qubes-mirage-firewall VS xnu

2) https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall is by far a better firewall for Qubes than OpenBSD ever will be - unikernels are far more secure than a traditional operating system is and you can read all about it on https://mirageos.org/

That's correct. It does mean that the closest to a self-contained program you can run is a unikernel like the mirage-firewall, unfortunately. On the upside, those remain easily portable to essentially anything that can run VMs so long as you adjust the image format.

That sounds similar to a unikernel. There are actual uses for those in seL4 and Qubes OS such as a firewall-qube (in theory unikernel qubes should be able to take far less system resources to run than full Linux+distro qubes).

Here's one that is "production" ready: the Mirage-Firewall microkernel running on Qubes OS.[0]

[0] : https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall

sys-net, sys-firewall and other administrative vms should slowly migrate to unikernels instead of running linux, which should help with ram usage. The mirage.io project seems to build a couple qubes vms, for example https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall is a firewall which they indicate to give 64Mb of ram.

> That said--in support of "not in a vacuum", and against myth-making.

Apple knows what they owe to open source software: https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

A lot of the core XNU and Darwin code is open source: https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

> When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack.

Uhh...

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/xnu-8796...

I think NeXT might've written an HFS Standard reader or something, but they used the Apple code for HFS+ so it ended up as a hybrid.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/rel/xnu-...

Mach message passing and objc message passing have no relation. I don’t think xnu contains much if any objc.

Obviously not all of its, but they contribute quite a bit. https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

here is the kernel source (they have branches for each individual macos release with its darwin kernel ver, macos 13 is ver 8792.xx.x for instance): https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

Apple does plenty of open source stuff. Safari's browser engine, Swift, libdispatch, the XNU kernel used by iOS and macOS, etc. And macOS is generally packed with open source things, like the default shell, zsh. Also, Metal actually predates Vulkan, so Vulkan was definitely not established when they started focusing on Metal. Yeah, they probably should consider supporting Vulkan now, but it's nothing to do with open source. The main beneficiaries of Apple supporting Vulkan would be people porting closed-source games.