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by Esau 3386 days ago
I don't think it is proper to consider Darwin a BSD fork. My understanding is that it is a Mack kernel with elements borrowed from BSD.
1 comments

It's not a "fork" per se, but it is reasonable to describe Darwin as a member of the BSD family tree, descended largely from FreeBSD. My understanding, based on my memory and the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU) is that the XNU kernel was built out of Mach, but then had 4.3BSD grafted on to provide a normal-looking UNIX API, which was later upgraded using FreeBSD. But it isn't a normal BSD, certainly; Darwin still shows its Mach heritage in the way it does process management and message passing.
Consider this one case study in the similarities of XNU, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD:

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/350824/5132