What can the fully compliant UNIX technology in Leopard do? It can run any POSIX-compliant source code. Help you make the most of multicore systems. Put a new, tabbed-interface Terminal at your fingertips. Introduce a whole host of new features that make life easier for every developer. Really, what can’t it do?
UNIX certification.
Leopard is an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Since Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code, you can deploy it in environments that demand full conformance — complete with hooks to maintain compatibility with existing software.
Terminal 2.
The Terminal application in Leopard takes advantage of the operating system’s native text and graphics capabilities, using Input Manager and Core Text to fully support non-English languages. The updated layout engine provides very fast rendering of ASCII, ISO, and Unicode text, and a new user interface gives users around the world the ability to harness the power of UNIX. A simplified inspector and integrated settings pane make it easy to change the look and feel of Terminal.
Self-Tuning TCP.
Leopard gets the best possible bandwidth from both broadband and narrowband networks by optimizing buffer sizes according to the local resources and connection type. Starting with a larger window helps TCP with ongoing dynamic optimization. This is especially valuable when connecting to high-bandwidth/high-latency networks like Verizon’s FiOS, which previously required specialized tools such as Broadband Tuner.
AutoFS.
The brand-new multithreaded AutoFS filesystem layer keeps track of which paths are actually located on remote AFP, SMB, or NFS fileservers — even across symlinks — and automatically mounts the appropriate server. The Finder and other applications needn’t wait for one mount to complete before requesting another. Now you can specify automount paths for your entire organization using the same standard automounter maps (for example, NIS) supported by Linux or Solaris.
64-bit applications.
Leopard is the first mainstream OS to completely and seamlessly support both 64-bit and 32-bit applications on the same platform, making use of all your existing devices. Even major graphical system libraries — including Cocoa, X11, and OpenGL — are available to both 32-bit and 64-bit processes.
Multicore optimized.
Leopard features improved scheduling, memory management, and processor affinity algorithms to make better use of multiple cores. Several subsystems (TCP networking, AutoFS automounter, and NFS server) have been rewritten to be fully multithreaded. Also, POSIX thread allocation has been optimized to support the new NSOperation APIs.
