Help a CS student out

[bondurant]

Hey everyone,
I'm a CS student at James Madison University in Virginia, and I'm working on a term project. My group is assigned to do a report on OSX and I'm having some trouble finding technical info about it on the web. These are the questions I need answered:
How does OSX manage memory? i.e., does it use fixed or dynamic partitioning, segmented or paged memory, and what page-replacement algorithm does it use if any?
What are the file system access methods, directory structure, and protection mechanisms utilized by OSX?
What is the physical organization of the file system and what algorithms are used for disk scheduling by OSX?

Any help would earn you my lasting gratitude.

[profx]

check out
http://developer.apple.com

there is a heap of info there. I dont know if they would give you the page replacement algo. But there is alot of lot level detail to be had there.

Good luck with your project

by the way welcome it looks like this is your first post. Welcome to the mac os x community!!

[michaelsanford]

1) Linux
2) Linux
3) Linux (Apple HFS+)

Seriously

Mach 3.0 kernel, and FreeBSD 4.4 form Darwin, the BSD backend. Check out www.apple.com/macosx/ there's actually some useful non-marketing technical information there...

Also you can check out the Darwin forum here, do a search for generic terms and you'll find lots of info. It might take some searching through threads but you'll get lots.

I hope further investigation of Mac OS X will have you soon visiting www.apple.com/switch/

[toast]

An interesting point for you would be to compare OS9 memory management (Memory Manager, heap fragmentation and so on) to OSX UNIX-based memory management.

Any info you need on the OSX core system you'll find in a book about UNIX/Darwin/BSD 4.4. A comparative study of the older and newer Mac OS, with a part on transition from a system to another [carbonization].