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Jordan Hubbard, Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies, spoke at LISA '08 last week. Most people are commenting on the date he gave for the release of Snow Leopard (10.6), the newest version of OS X. I have to admit, I'm ready for some stability improvements, but I was much more intrigued by the details of his talk (PDF).

He spent the bulk of his talk on technical features in Leopard (10.5) that many aren't aware of. He starts with a number of security improvements in Leopard: file quarantine, sandbox, package and code signing, application firewall, parental controls, non-executable (NX) data, address space layout, and randomization. I was completely unaware of most of these improvements.

Jordan also talks about the Unix improvements in Leopard. Leopard is fully Unix compliant. But more than that includes a number of additions like DTrace, Launchd (complete), ASL (replacement for syslog), a read-only version of ZFS (for future compatibility) with a read/write version available. He also talked about Apple's evolving open source strategy.

Last, he talks about improvements coming in OS X that will help developers take better advantage of the multicore chips and sophisticated GPUs that already ship with most Macs. Future kernels will provide better facilities, along with APIs, for managing multi-threaded programs. He says:

Forget everything you thought you knew about multi-threaded programming (and, as it turns out, most developers didn't know much anyway). The kernel is the only one who really knows the right mix of cores and power states to use at any given time - this can't be a pure app-driven decision

I don't know if there's audio or video of the talk available, but it would be very good to hear firsthand.

BTW, anyone know what "LWFLAF" stands for? Jordan uses it as some kind of metric in discussion the various versions of OS X, but I couldn't figure out what it meant.