Ever wonder what happens when a Mac boots OS X? More than you ever wanted to ever know is revealed in this article from the Apple developer site. The article concentrates on startup — those processes that take place after the operating system is loaded and contains useful information like rc.boot as well as pointers to other useful Apple developer articles on things like how User Sessions are initialized and what happens during logout, shutdown and restart. It also shows a table of common system daemons and Core startup items.