GabrielRicard's Profile

There's another item that was not properly researched before writing this article: the Linux kernel's license. The Linux kernel is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which explicitly forbids directly linking GPL-licensed code with non-free code. Apple simply cannot use the Linux kernel for Mac OS X because there is no way any proprietary code (think drivers and kernel extensions) can be loaded by the kernel. This applies not only to third-party drivers and extensions, but to Apple's also. Legal issues aside, it would be a tremendous amount of work for Apple to yank out XNU and insert the Linux kernel in its place. I would think that that time would be better spent working on performance improvements for XNU, which really is not very slow anyways. Not slow enough to warrant a switch to the Linux kernel, at the least.