What is a Mach Service?

Question

I've seen the term "Mach Service" used in many places. One such place being the man page for launchd.plist, another being xpc_connection_create_mach_service, yet I cannot find any documentation online explicitly defining what a Mach Service is. Closest thing I've found is the Mach Overview documentation, but that seems to be unrelated to "Mach Services" and closer to a more abstract umbrella term for a list of kernel primitives.

So what is a Mach Service and what is the Mach bootstrap namespace? What functionality is it capable of? What is its purpose within an Application Bundle?

XPC

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Posted by

jbicklebb

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Answer 1

I just wrote a bunch of info about this in XPC and App-to-App Communication.

You can also find a lot of background to this in Technote 2083 Daemons and Agents (that’s super old, so some details aren’t right, but the basics are still valid).

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

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eskimo

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Answer 2

Mach is the name of an OS kernel, which is used among others in MacOS.

Read details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

Posted by

Claude31

So does that make "Mach Service" just any service launched by launchd then? Everything I find in sudo launchctl list would be considered a mach service?

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jbicklebb

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Answer 3

I just wrote a bunch of info about this in XPC and App-to-App Communication.

You can also find a lot of background to this in Technote 2083 Daemons and Agents (that’s super old, so some details aren’t right, but the basics are still valid).

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Posted by

eskimo

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What is a Mach Service?

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