There are some kernel functions which could be useful in normal Cocoa applications. But the API seems to be completely undocumented? not even the headers in /usr/include/mach/ carries any interesting comments, and using Google to search for some of the functions turns up < 5 hits…
Is the Darwin API undocumented? is there perhaps some documentation for the Mach or BSD APIs which can be used instead?
man, whatis, or apropos from the terminal. Or, if you prefer Help / Open man page in Xcode or Project Builder.
Also, in Xcode and/or on the Apple developer site, there is a section for Darwin.
In addition,
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/
and
http://opendarwin.org/documentation/
And, last but not least, there is the Darwin source code.
Thanks, but none of this documentation seems to document the things in /usr/include/mach/ – for example try to find some documentation on the functions in semaphore.h.
Which would be: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/synchronization/index.html but this page only mentions some of the functions, and say the documentation is in the header (which it isn’t).
http://www.osxfaq.com/man/2/sem_open.ws –zootbobbalu
also try
man sem_open man sem_clt man semget man semop man sem_close man sem_post man sem_trywait man sem_unlink man sem_wait man sem_umask
I don’t remember if I found man pages for the vm_* functions I’ve been using, but grep -r whatever /usr/include/mach is very much your friend.
I should have written mach/semaphore.h above – the functions you list are not the ones in mach/semaphore.h (but a POSIX extension it would seem).
I don’t know if POSIX does offer the same, as I e.g. have no idea what semaphore_wait_signal() is all about…
My actual problem is that I wish to wait for both a normal signal (normally done with sigwait()) and a semaphore of some sort, I do not think the function above does the job – but would prefer the documentation nonetheless…
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/synchronization/chapter_15_section_2.html
Which, as stated above, does not document the functions � it only lists some of them, and state the documentation is in the headers.
For the IPC functions you mentioned, It can be found on the sites of the links I gave you…
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.3.1/xnu-517/osfmk/man/
http://cvs.opendarwin.org/index.cgi/~checkout~/src/xnu/osfmk/man/index.html?rev=1.1.1.1&content-type=text/plain
Thanks a lot! I don’t know which path you took with the first links you gave to arrive at the above, cause this is what I have been searching for in quite some time � unfortunately though, the documentation seems to be incomplete as there is e.g. no mention of:
*semaphore_timedwait *semaphore_wait_signal *semaphore_timedwait_signal *semaphore_operator
Sorry, I guess you can’t have everything. ;-) File a bug report with Apple, as these seem to be extensions added to mach by NeXT or Apple. I was unable to find any reference to these functions outside of Apple that was not related to Darwin. As a note, the sem_ functions noted by zootbobbalu are the IPC primitive functions for SMP suport in BSD. While I have not checked myself, I would suspect (and this is easily verifiable in the Darwin source) that these boil down to wrappers/extensions around the mach primitives.