
Apple Is Looking for Linux Kernel Developers - MikusR
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Hiring-For-Linux-Kernel
======
twotwotwo
Note it looks like it's for developing drivers to run on embedded ARM devices
in silicon validation. I'm at least as uninformed as anybody here, but that
has lots of non-earth-shaking interpretations.

If you have, say, a farm of little ARM-driven devices that you use as test
harnesses for chips or other hardware, it isn't necessarily cheaper to port
whatever variation of xnu to this particular hardware than to use an existing
port of Linux and hire some folks who can help with the low level I/O bits.
There might even be Linux in your world because, e.g. an acquired company
built something on it that hasn't been worth porting.

Or any of a ton of other possibilities.

Having an OS doesn't mean you have to use (variations of) it for _everything_
, especially if the new use you're thinking about is far from your usual.

------
nbsd4life
If you like open source, don't work for Apple.

I've seen multiple people stop all their open source contributions and
communicating online after being hired by them. I assume they have very
draconian NDAs.

~~~
michel-slm
From what I hear, at Apple you're not allowed to contribute to open source
projects (unless it's part of your day job) even in your own time - in
contrast to Google (from what I hear) and Facebook (personal experience) where
you can but you must clear it with legal and it can't be related to your day
job.

~~~
solomatov
And how does it work in CA? AFAIU, there're laws which prevent such
limitations in most cases. I.e. everything which is done on the person's time
is their own choice.

~~~
Joky
It is hard to find something that can't somehow be considered to compete with
Apple. And in CA you can be let go for no reason, so... For example, I
couldn't get approval to contribute patches to a gallery plugin for Wordpress
that I was using for my personal blog, because you know, the Photos app is a
gallery of photos.

~~~
eikenberry
I hope you quit after that. Working for a company so draconian and anti-
society would drive me mad.

~~~
scarface74
There are tons of developers who not only don't care about writing open source
software on the side, actually go home after working 8 hours a days on
computers and decide not to do any code at all and spend time on other
hobbies, with their family, etc.

~~~
Joky
Actually, going home my wife would be the one complaining about not being able
to do what she wanted with the blog and asking me to fix it ;)

------
dmitrygr
Most Apple SOCs boot Linux inside apple HQ to run tests. There are drivers for
everything and it all works. Linux turns out to be a more convenient way to do
validation and testing than iOS. Obviously this code is never released outside
of apple.

Source: ex-applers

~~~
nomel
Do you mean Darwin? Or is there an actual Linux/non-BSD install?

~~~
matthewmacleod
I’ve also heard that this is the case. Linux means Linux; Darwin is an
entirely different operating system, though it uses some BSD user land.

------
robbyt
Probably for custom networking or storage hardware. Apple is a major high tech
corporation, and what OS runs their data centers? (Not MacOS)

~~~
derefr
NetBSD, IIRC. (Which you might say is the "upstream" of Apple's Darwin in
about the same way that Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.)

~~~
riffraff
Don't you mean freebsd?

~~~
derefr
Nope:
[https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin](https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin)

~~~
jsnell
That link does not say Apple is using NetBSD in the datacenter. It says that
some of the userland tools in OS X come from NetBSD.

~~~
derefr
My response was just to counter the common misapprehension that macOS itself
is built on a FreeBSD userland. It's NetBSD, and devices like the AirPort
Extreme/Time Capsule use NetBSD directly. And, back when the iTunes Store was
a WebObjects service, it was hosted on Xserves running a weird reverse-Darwin
(i.e. a Darwin-shimmed userland atop a NetBSD kernel, because macOS itself
wasn't yet performant enough to be a good server but they still needed
WebObjects to run.)

These days, Apple's datacenters are running all sorts of things, including
Darwin, Linux, Solaris, and AIX[1]. But the "Darwin" part is still essentially
NetBSD, not FreeBSD.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/tale-of-two-data-center-
strateg...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/tale-of-two-data-center-strategies-
apple-vs-facebook/?tag=content;siu-container)

~~~
2trill2spill
> My response was just to counter the common misapprehension that macOS itself
> is built on a FreeBSD userland.

I don't think most people say that macOS is built on top of a FreeBSD
userland. Most people rightly point out that there is a lot of FreeBSD code
inside the macOS code base specifically the XNU kernel[1].

> But the "Darwin" part is still essentially NetBSD, not FreeBSD.

That's incorrect while there is NetBSD code in MacOS. Dismissing the FreeBSD
code, the Mach code, the code Apple wrote and saying that Darwin is
essentially NetBSD is extremely disingenuous[2].

[1]: [https://github.com/apple/darwin-
xnu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=...](https://github.com/apple/darwin-
xnu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=freebsd&type=)

[2]:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html)

------
kristoffer
Note: Silicon validation engineer.

They probably use Linux as extra validation for their chips.

------
bobbytherobot
Not just Linux Kernel, but embedded Linux Kernel. If it was just Linux Kernel
development, I would assume it was for cloud storage.

~~~
dralley
Or their Apple Car project.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
Bingo. Apple has a good amount of engineers working on Linux and QNX embedded
devices. I think it's pretty clear at this point that they are still working
on cars and that they are also integrating those cars with Apple maps. I think
they want to kill two birds with one stone with Project Titan: get more map
data and develop software for self-driving cars.

------
vbezhenar
May be they want to write Linux drivers for their Macs? They did that for
Windows.

~~~
my123
They want _ARM_ experience, presages some future Macs :P And note that it's
within Apple's silicon validation team.

------
lykr0n
Wouldn't it be cool if they are thinking about moving to the Linux kernel to
reduce overhead?

~~~
danieldk
Not if that means the end of I/O Kit as a relatively stable driver interface.

~~~
primitur
But YES PLEASE if it means we don't have to deal with endless new bugs
introduced by their heinous QA of lately .. APFS, root logins, &etc.

~~~
mjcl
I would expect that the wholesale change from Darwin to Linux would introduce
an amazing number of new and awful bugs. It's not like their development
processes will suddenly be fixed when it's been touched by Linux.

~~~
primitur
I believe Linux (the kernel) has one of the most productive, QA production
lines out there. If Apple were to adopt the "Linux way", we may indeed see a
change ..

On the other hand, it may work against us, having Apple involved in Linux
things. I'm not sold either way - but I sit here, re-installing MacOS on two
Macbook Pro's, both of which absolutely refuse to make a usable/safe disk
image out of their own disks. This is such a frustrating conundrum, it feels
like Solaris in the 90's. I can only hope something changes at Apple, or else
I'm just going to wipe MacOS and put Linux on these machines. That is quite a
watershed, imho.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Have you run a drive test? If you're having storage errors it could manifest
itself in weird ways.

~~~
primitur
Yes, I've done it and Disk Utility doesn't think there's anything wrong. But
yet, I've tried over and over to make a disk image - of different disks, even
- and every single time I get the error "no usable disk image found". At this
point, after having scoured the web for clues, I can only conclude: this is a
bug in MacOS.

I'm now trying to do a full update to the latest release, and see if it works
beyond that point - but if it doesn't, the good ol' tarball approach is all
I've got left.

I think Apple has some QA issues.

------
jijojv
Apple is indeed hiring - e.g.
[https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?#&ss=Linux%20Driver%20and%2...](https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?#&ss=Linux%20Driver%20and%20Kernel%20Developer)

------
kineticfocus
I'm surprised I haven't seen Fuchsia mentioned... anywhere.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia)

------
Mononokay
Embedded devices—what's the HomePod running?

~~~
Operyl
Same thing most of their devices are ultimately running, now, some variation
of iOS.

EDIT:
[https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/89096147427705651...](https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/890961474277056513)

------
ausjke
yes i noticed that job posting and it is actually very close to where I live,
I even thought about applying, then I'm not an apple fan and I don't
appreciate the way Apple deals with OSS, so I stopped.

it's about chip validation and has nothing to do with MacOS etc, because it
will be pretty unwise to use MacOS to check silicons.

------
baybal2
Finally throwing out Mach out of the window or something needed for something
else?

------
CivilEngineer
Although maybe it's too hard to find "osx kernel developers" outside of Apple
so they look for the next best thing. It may not be a sign of them switching
to Linux.

~~~
WhyNotHugo
I think for that sort of stuff, they'd put an ad for "Kernel Developer", and
just ask for Linux (or BSD) experience.

This sort of ad seems to indicate they'd hire somebody to actually work on
Linux stuff.

------
blinkingled
A very far fetched possibility would be that Macs will run iOS - no UNIX stuff
exposed, everything signed and secure. An embedded SoC will run in secure
space and expose Linux in a iOS terminal application so you can do all your
development work - ssh, vim and whatnot there.

Kind of like WSL but instead main OS is completely locked down and instead of
software emulation you get isolated hardware to run Linux.

~~~
mankash666
To enable iOS apps on the Mac, they only need to activate the iOS developer
API with their existing OS - Darwin. AFAIK, iOS and macos share the same
kernel, more or less

~~~
matthewmacleod
Yeah, it’s worth pointing out that iOS _already runs on the mac_ , as anybody
who’s used the simulator knows.

