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Architecture of macOS

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The Architecture of Mac OS X covers a number of topics about the software architecture of the Mac OS X operating system. The architecture of Mac OS X can be split into several categories: the user experience (Aqua), security architecture, layered architecture, runtime architecture, kernel environment, system-level technologies (core OS), and some of the application-level technologies (most notably the Human Interface Toolbox).

Mac OS X is a 64-bit preemptible, graphical user interface and Unix-based operating system that was first released in 2001. It is closely based on the NEXTSTEP object-oriented operating system, which was in turn based on the Mach kernel and BSD. Similar to NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, but somewhat different, Mac OS X is built on Darwin, an open source, Unix-like environment based on the BSD subsystem implementation of Unix, and the Mach microkernel.

Mac OS X, like other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 2000, uses a modified microkernel. Instead of running as a user-level process on top of Mach, the BSD subsystem runs in kernel mode in the same address space as Mach itself. Most message passing between Mach and BSD is eliminated in this situation; the BSD subsystem can interact with Mach via normal function calls.

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