Hardware manual

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2 Inside Mac OS X Server
Mac OS X Server blends a mature, stable UNIX foundation
with open standards support and Macintosh ease of use.
This chapter introduces the services that Mac OS X Server offers and tells you where to
find more information about them.
Core System Services
Mac OS X Server is built on top of Darwin, the core Mac OS X operating system. Darwin
integrates Mach 3.0 operating-system services based on FreeBSD (Berkeley Software
Distribution) 4.8 and the latest advances from FreeBSD 5.0. It includes high-
performance networking facilities. It provides support for multiple integrated file
systems, BSD symmetric multiprocessing with fine-grain locking, and 64-bit
applications. Advanced networking capabilities include support for IPv6, IPSec, and link
aggregation.
A key factor in the stability of the system is Darwin’s advanced memory protection and
management system. Darwin ensures reliability by providing applications and
processes with their own unique address space. The Mach 3 microkernel supports
multitasking and multiprocessing, memory management, real-time scheduling, unified
buffer cache, hot-plug drivers, and power management.
Ease of use and simplicity are hallmarks of Mac OS X. It’s visually powerful, using
graphics technologies based on OpenGL, Quartz, and QuickTime. Mac OS X Server
takes advantage of these capabilities by providing administrators with server
management applications that are easy to use, but powerful and secure. Administrators
who prefer to work in a command-line environment can do so. A complete shell
environment, including popular UNIX utilities, offers a full palette of command-line
administration techniques.
Read on to learn about the services that Mac OS X Server provides to extend its
Mac OS X core in order to support Macintosh, Windows, UNIX, and Linux clients over a
network. To learn more about server administration tools, see the getting started guide.
The Preface tells you where you can find it.