Is the iPhone using L4 ?

Posted by alpheccar - Jan 11 2007 at 10:35 CEST

The iPhone is no more a rumor and it is using OS X ! What does it mean ?

I think it probably means that they are using Objective C rather than relying on C++ like competitor OS running on other mobile phones.

They are probably using a subset of the Cocoa APIs.

But, I don't think they are running Mach... There have been some rumors about the possiblity for Apple to use L4 for the future versions of Mac OS X.

L4 on a mobile phone would make much more sense. It would also enable some kind of virtualization which can be a very useful feature in the future to decrease costs. With virtualization you can more easily port the modem (GSM/GPRS/EDGE ...) software on the applicative processor without compromising the stability or hard realtime constraints of the modem software. And low cost solution for mobiles will require the use of monocore chips.

Tags mobile phone | OS X | iphone | apple | kernel