Mac OS X and iOS Internals: To the Apple's Core

by Jonathan Levin

An in-depth look into Mac OS X and iOS kernelsPowering Macs, iPhones, iPads and more, OS X and iOS are becoming ubiquitous. When it comes to documentation, however, much of them are shrouded in mystery. Cocoa and Carbon, the application frameworks, are neatly described, but system programmers find the rest lacking. This indispensable guide illuminates the darkest corners of those systems, starting with an architectural overview, then drilling all the way to the core.Provides you with a top down view of OS X and iOSWalks you through the phases of system startup--both Mac (EFi) and mobile (iBoot)Explains how processes, threads, virtual memory, and filesystems are maintainedCovers the security architectureReviews the internal Apis used by the system--BSD and MachDissects the kernel, XNU, into its sub components: Mach, the BSD Layer, and I/o kit, and explains each in detailExplains the inner workings of device drivers

From architecture to implementation, this book is essential reading if you want to get serious about the internal workings of Mac OS X and iOS.

Genres: Technology, Computers, Technical, Programming

828 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2012

About the author

Jonathan[2spaces]Levin

CTO/Founder at Technologeeks.com

Reviews

[sine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh. This book tries to be more up-to-date and it is also less verbose. I consider the latter as a good thing - for example to understand the boot loader you don't need to write an implementation for The Towers of Hanoi.

It's not an easy book to comprehend and it requires as a complementary reading the manual pages and Apple Developer Documentation, but the end result is very rewarding, if you need a guide through the kernel internals. Albeit the book is a few years old and currently there is a newer edition (actually there would be three books instead of this one, written from scratch), I strongly recommend to start with this one. Because the book contains a lot of code snippets, you can compare them with the current version of XNU to get a nice picture what changed and how. Some of the code parts are as old as NeXTSTEP and because the strong dependency on Mach, the fundamentals are still the same.

The interested reader could download the book for free from the official site: http://newosxbook.com/1stEdIsFree.html.

[Ari Demarco · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a great book to read. It's a better option than "MAC OS X Internals: A Systems Approach" as it's more up-to-date and covers some topics in more detail. This is a great option if you want to start diving deep into the architecture, security & other deep topics about MacOS. You can find great information on obscure topics that it's difficult to find, like the BSD Layer, Mach/Mach-O, Memory Management, etc.
In my opinion, if you're going serious about diving deep into macOS, I'd go directly with the other three books of Jonathan Levin as they're far more detailed than this one, and cover plenty of other topics this book doesn't. At the same time, those books are more up-to-date than this one. However, if you just want a glance at how does macOS work, and what are certain things in the OS, then this book is a great option.

[Laurent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had very much liked reading the Amit Singh on the OSX internals, even though a good chunk was dating for the PowerPC era. Right now this book is proving a very worthy replacement

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel silly for not working on systems my whole career. So cool.

[Roger Casaliñas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opened my mind to town of new things in the lower layers of OSX and iOS. A must have reference for network or device driver developers. Has some useful tidbits for jailbreak enthusiasts, too!