Jordan Hubbard, Director of UNIX Technology at Apple gave a talk at LISA this year about OS X and how continues to come along as a robust, UNIX operating system. Many rare insights were revealed during the talk about recent developments powering the OS X operating system.

Some topics discussed was the process of converting OS X into a certified UNIX operating system, how file quarantine works, the lesser-known sandbox profile language which is based on FreeBSD Mandatory Access Control, code signing on all of the binaries and libraries of OS X, better programming language support (RubyCocoa, HotCocoa, and PyObjC), Apple Syslog, and ZFS.

The Apple Syslog (ASL) is a complete rewrite of syslog from the ground up. ASL offers a consistently encoded syslog format as welll as a Boolean search API. ASL is open source, available on macosforge.org, and not dependant on Apple technology.

In the talk ZFS was spoken about in Leopard. The current Apple implementation of ZFS is read-only, however there is a full read-write implementation on http://zfs.macosforge.org.

Hubbard’s talk was informative and exclusive and offered bits and pieces of information that otherwise would be unlikely to discover. The information presented at this talk gave some informative insights into Apple’s more silent innovations, as well as the more public vocal ones.