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Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Kernel Engineering Manager posted a walkthrough for building and running a kernel from these sources:

https://kernelshaman.blogspot.com/2021/01/building-xnu-for-m...

> NOTE: due to missing network (Skywalk) and power management (XCPM) functionality, your machine will be missing some features. For example, sleep/wake will not work.

That's a little sad, is this recent? I'm pretty sure that at least as recently as El Capitan, you didn't loose any obvious functionality by recompiling the kernel.

I'm glad they document this, but why is this on blogspot instead of a readme in the source or some other official apple.com page?

I guess they suffer from the same disease as the Android team that writes documentation on Medium, and before that G+, instead of Android official documentation.

This is the kind of stuff Wikis (and wiki-likes) were made for. It's so frustrating when trying to find some references and stumble across the answer on random blog posts.

They self document what they did at work in their own private time. Companies engender this behaviour by calling them "heroes" or "MVP". Particular product/technology gets exposure, free (as in beer) advertising, and similarly as free digestible documentation (project walkthrough) from your staff.

If you forced employee to publish on a wiki, it would feel far too much like work. Having it on a privately owned public forum gives a sense of personal ownership and development.

It also gives them creative control.

It's no fun if you have to go through a multi step technical, managerial, docs team and legal review process where PM makes you include/exclude what they want to turn it into a marketing doc, your manager shuffles your priorities, the docs team makes you dumb it down, blow up the word count and remove external links and convert to .docx that will only be available to registered enterprise customers, and then finally legal tells you you can't write any of this anyway.

All of these concerns are orthogonal to whether or not these employees are expected, tacitly or otherwise, to do this necessary work on their own time. There's no reason Apple and Google, of all the companies in the world, can't set aside time for their employees to write documentation, and there's no reason they can't organize their bureaucracy in such a way as to not inhibit this creativity.

Probably because that document is not endorsed by Apple Corporation.

In other words, corporate bureaucracy getting in the way. Not surprising when it's one of the most secretive companies too.

This is actually a more interesting release. Though it would be more interesting if it were for the M1 kernel.

As per the article:

> It is not currently possible to build open source XNU for Apple Silicon Macs.

If anyone had a doubt about the closed nature of Apple ARM processors, this should dispel it.

Well, it didn't dispel it for me. Especially the "currently" part. What now?

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