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Darwin on Crusoe?
MacOS Rumors is running a blurb that Apple is exploring porting Darwin to other processors (including Transmeta's Crusoe processor) due to frustration with availability of high speed Motorola G4 processors. An interesting though, a Mac without a Motorola chip... Of course, it's just a rumor at this point... (update: I've got it
confirmed from "anonymous sources" that this is true)
aye, and they almost certainly will create a G4 emulato-- err, Code Morpher
i would like to see it on both, chances are, though, that the x86 port of darwin would be available before the g4 crusoe.
theoretically, since the code morphing software resides in flash memory, once it does happen, all you'd need to do is flash it, and give it a new hdd (or lose your windoze data.)
either way, i wouldn't use darwin as my main os,.. it's cute, it's interesting, but i'm fairly certain it's not going to perform up to my standards (especially on a crusoe.)
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
"Considering that the G4 and Athlon have very similar architectures,"
;-))
Danger, Will Robinson!
G4 = Altivec (128bit SIMD)
K7 = 3DNow!/MMX (32bit SIMD)
G4 = Limited quantities, low-ish Mhz
K7 = Less limited quantities. Big-ish Mhz
G4 = RISCy instruction set
K7 = CISCified instruction set
G4 = Uses some pipelines for efficiency.
K7 = Uses more CPU pipelines for greater efficiency.
G4 = Flat memory model.
K7 = Segmented until you switch into protected mode.
G4 = More registers than you can shake a stick at.
K7 = We have cache. Who needs registers?
Ok, they're both made out of silicon at some point, but they're as similar as tampons and kurt@thepope.org (Nice rash, btw
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I have been told by a fairly in the know person that there is some sort of deal between M$ and Apple in regards to the production of Office for the MacOS and not being allowed to port OSX to x86 machines. Wether this is true or not, it seems possible.
-- I could prove I'm right, but I my hard drive's full.
dmoz has links to a couple of parody sites as well.
http://macosrumorz.8m.com/ - hilarious poem at this one
http://macosrumorz.8m.com/mosr.html - hilarious picture of Meader...
http://macosrumors.8m.com/ - another parody...
http://members.tripod.com/~MacOSHumor/ - pretty funny
http://macosrumorsrumors.8m.com/ - another one...
http://paulschreiber.com/mosrr/ - another one...
Paul
It's like Henry Ford's famous remark that the consumer can get the Model T in any color, so long as it's black.
Crusoe will emulate any chip, so long as it's an x86.
There was no mention in the article about running on x86. This is more about being able to integrate more than one CPU type into the UMA-x chipset boards to eliminate shortage issues. IMHO, Apple doesn't want to make this move because of the heat and power advantages a small die size offers with the PPC as opposed to the huge/hungry x86's. They also are probably reluctant to use crusoe when they've gotten g4's to work in portables in house...too large of a performance hit.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
The reason Apple wouldn't allow it is because the current situation allows Apple to continue to gouge their customers by forcing them to buy Apple hardware.
True. But another good reason is that supporting an OS on commodity PC hardware is expensive.
If they did ship an x86 Mac, people would continually bitch that there wasn't drivers for their nVidia cards, their winmodems, their oddball SCSI cards, their software-driven printers, their old scanners, ATA-66, weird PCMCIA chipsets and so on.
The inability to supply every possible driver on the x86 platform is a huge concern -- it's hampered the success of Solaris x86, OS/2, BeOS, and pretty much every other OS except Windows and Linux (and even Linux is always going to have it's winmodem problems.)
Besides, the article is about "Darwin" not MacOS proper. Darwin is the Mach kernel and the BSD layer. It's been open sourced (= no direct revenue for Apple), and a x86 source tree already exists with a bunch of drivers from the OpenStep/Intel era.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Maybe Apple has no interest on shipping OSX or any of their os's on other processors. I think there is one tangible advantage of encouraging diverse development of darwin's kernel. The more platforms darwin runs on, the more people are working on the kernel. If Apple never ships a non-ppc machine, this move still enhances the quality of the os they bundel with their ppc boxes. I think they are trying to build a larger developer community for darwin in order to enhance the foundation of OSX on PPC.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
From the article you site:
According to an email Strum received from Apple, which CNET News.com obtained a copy of, the company said its contract with resellers restricts sales to end users only, meaning the computers can't be redistributed by Freemac. Strum, as one might expect, thinks that argument doesn't wash because a corporate customer buying from a CompUSA redistributes products to employees.
Looks to me like apples hands were tied. It is entirely possible that the distbutors threatened apple with a really, really big stick.
While there are many ills that can be laid at the feet of apple (I know, I own a performa 6400 with a yellow flickering 15" Av Monitor), I don't think they had much choice in the matter.
Myddrin
Crusoe runs whatever file systems the developers of the operating system it's running (and developers of "third-party" file systems - which, on free-software OSes, could be thought of as "file systems not in the official code base", e.g. ReiserFS for Linux) tell it to run.
It doesn't, but many OSes (dating back at least as far as SunOS 2.0, in the mid '80's) have a "virtual file system" or "installable file system" mechanism that allows more than one file system type to run on that OS; code above the file system makes generic "read file", "write file", "remove file", etc. calls, which turn into calls to the "read file", "write file", etc. functions for the OS in question.
That's how UNIXes these days support their default on-disk file system, and the ISO 9660 file system on CD-ROMs, and remote file systems such as NFS (and SMB/CIFS, at least on Linux, with smbfs); that's how Windows NT supports the Windows 9x version of the DOS file system, and NTFS, and the ISO 9660 file system, and remote file systems such as SMB/CIFS (and NFS, with third-party add-ons); and so on.
MacOS X has, as far as I know, such a mechanism (it may or may not be the VFS mechanism in current BSDs).
But I'm not sure how this is at all relevant to Crusoe. Most OSes Crusoe is likely to run have such a "virtual file system" mechanism, but most if not all OSes Crusoe is likely to run will think they're just running on an x86 processor, and the VFS mechanism will work Just Fine on any x86 (or SPARC, or Alpha, or PowerPC, or...) processor - it doesn't require special CPU magic.
I wasn't saying that sites that have error messages and won't "'load up'" hurt the reputation of the owners of the website, and annoys potential viewers of the site. I didn't feel the need to say this, because it's perfectly obvious.
The point I was trying to make was that just because a site has errors, does not necessarily mean the writers don't know what they're talking about (unless, of course they're supposed to be talking about making a web site without errors). It may mean the writers (or the webmaster) don't know to set up a link to have people tell them their site's not working. In other words, if you can't read content on a site to judge that site when that site can't deliver the content you're supposed to judge, then don't judge the validity of its articles.
I didn't realize "cluefullness" was a word in the English Language.1) Anyone who actually gives two shits about Life On Slashdot should notify Malda of the above "moderator abuse." I don't. [Fart noise.]
2) I've used a few OSes, and had a few more inflicted on me at jobs, and re "stability" I'd rank them in this order: MacOS, Irix, DOS, Be, Solaris, NetBSD, Amiga, Linux, Windows. I doubt anyone else would agree with me, because, see, there's this weird thing people do: they use their computers for different things. You can go play Quake now.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Anybody notice that the real life Darwin was also famous for his work on the Galapagos Islands (in the Pacific), and that Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a desert island (since I didn't read the book, I don't know where it was, but there's a chance it was in the Pacific).
Only makes since that their silicon counterparts are somewhat related as well.
Yep... and there are some versions of OF that can even telnet. There have been a few boot menu's coded in forth for the OF on powerpc machines i have seen too. Most weren't very professional but I would like to see some one write one of those in BIOS. Or for that matter even net boot a machine with BIOS.
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Can I Play With Madness?
Or at least the Powerbooks. I would look for it being in either the iBook (the high end Transmeta chip) and the new Apple-branded Palm, or just the new Palm handheld.
:). (G4 Newton...hehehe)
If they do use it in a Palm, this contradicts the story because the existing Apple portables used the ARM processors which I think was a company that was separate from Motorola. I guarntee they didn't have a G4 in them
A Palm with the Transmeta chip would seriously get some drool factor and be serious lotion for stock motion on announcement though...
- Sig
Yeah... It's just kinda sad. They used to be really great. I remember when they ran the story about the PowerComputing license buyback weeks before anyone else had a clue. Now they just pull stuff out of their arse, it seems.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
As nice a story as this is, I believe that another possibility is more likely. Apple's relationship with Motorola has often been strained. By issuing this rumor, they hoping to pressure Motorola a bit more.
Long time Apple watchers will remember periodic stories about MacOS being ported to Intel - the most recent followed the purchase of NeXT. But, nothing has come out of it. As nice as the Crusoe chip sounds, I suspect that if Apple was to do a port, AMD or Intel would be the more likely target.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Take a new Apple laptop ( not a high Mhz monster )
through in a Curosoe that has been given the software to "be" a G4 (just like it can "be" an x86) and you have a partial solution to the G4 shortage and a pretty cool laptop tooo (that could run linux).
If the prices at Transmeta are correct it would also be cheaper for apple then getting G4's,
Sounds like a perfect match to me.
Myddrin
So why should Apple use Motorola chips?
Deleted
do not believe *anything* on macosrumors! Ryan, the guy who writes it, has literally no fucking idea what the hell he is talking about.
the only reason anyone (who isn't an idiot) reads mosr is to see just how bad it is.
check out mosr.net, it was set up by people who were thoroughly pissed off the shite mosr.com writes. it looks like it isn't being updated anymore, but check out some of the archived stuff - its very funny (in a juvenile way). especially the stuff about ryan's girlfriend...
From what I've heard, those image manipulations are all done in hardware-accelerated OpenGL, so the processor speed shouldn't be quite as important as it seems at first glance. Remember, OS X is supposed to run on all G3s, even all the way back to the 233MHz models.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
This doesn't just apply to the Crusoe. Any emulator has the same problem.
I think you're forgetting that the Crusoe is 75% software. The "RISC instructions" would be translated and optimized by said software into native code, and cached. The cache size is set at boot time, but can be changed afterwards by the operating system.
Be careful trying to characterize "all emulators."
on-board scsi was last seen on the "gray" G3's (the first G3s). Ever since then, it has been an add-on pci card. blue/white g3s, g4s, and imacs have no onboard scsi. not sure about the master slave....I have two ide drives in my blue g3 at work, but the are on different controllers.
If what you say is true..... then I still don't care.
There's a Mac SE with 4MB RAM sitting next to me on the floor, although it's running a slightly older version of System 6 I think. Just for fun one time I plugged in a v.90 modem and got it to connect to the Internet and run an FTP client. Amazing what you can do with a couputer built fifteen years ago, isn't it?
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MIPS is not longer owned by SGI. SGI still uses MIPS processors, and
has one in design, but they are not in the business of supplying
processors to other companies. MIPS Inc and other suppliers do sell
MIPS processors, but they tend to concentrate on the embedded market.
So it seems quite unlikely that SGI is working on porting any MAC OS
to MIPS.
The suggestion that AMD would create a version of the Athlon to run
MAC OS also seems very unlikely. The story make it sound like a
simple matter to remove X86 "emulation" from the Athlon. This is
nonsense. It would be a huge redesign. The Athlon is an x86
processor, not an emulator.
Same as Intel whores out it's MB's Motorola does the same, just not as succesfuly. A few minutes searching should find you some. Last I heard they were fabu but for the price and so much code being X86-specific out in the world.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Of course, there are exceptions to this, but that's how it usually works.
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it would be kinda fun to boot a MacOS on my vanilla old k6 :P
"Going to church makes you no more a christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car." --Loosely paraphrased, Ga
Good God!
you mean these Mac OS Rumors are _Rumors_ in the sense of Rumors, not Rumors in the sense of verified fact?
Ohh... I hate that.
Who am I? Subscribe and find out
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Indeed. Mac OS Rumors is rather unusual among the websites I've visited in that it has acquired a nemesis -- www.mosr.net and a dedicated suck-style parody: Mac OS Rumorz. Basically, they occasionally get a thing or two right, but they're more often wrong than right -- much, much more often.
Sometimes the stuff they post is just plain unbelievable -- like a G4 with the FSB overclocked to 133 running a 666MHz G3. Sound plausible? Might, if not for the fact that the "sawtooth" motherboard doesn't have any FSB-adjusting jumpers or any other way to adjust it, and that no one makes G3s with the proper configuration to fit into the wierd socket on that motherboard.
They also one said that their information came from a "secure video feed" from inside Apple headquarters. Excuse me? What the fuck is a "secure video feed"?
Of course, they might well be completely right about this Crusoe business, just because it seems completely sensible as something Apple might do. They might be great for a Sub-iBook with their low power drain, and according to the Arstechnica review of Crusoe, Transmeta is also working on a version that's designed for performance rather than low power use.
It runs 680X0 apps like the high-end Macs that run on those processors. A Pentium 166 runs MacOS 6 apps like a Mac IIfx under DOS. Think of what it'd be like on a PIII equivalent.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If Darwin runs on x86 (which I think it does), there's nothing to port. It should already run on Crusoe.
if they plan to use crusoe, among others, as a new processor for their computers, will apple port the code to x86 or will they merely emulate a motorola processor using the crusoe? certainly a valid question.
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Nice.
And it works too...
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Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
For anyone who thinks Apple is dead, this is a good thing to point out: Apple is selling so many computers that IBM and Motorola combined can't make enough processors to meet Apple's demands.
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I'm glad that Apple is finally looking at other processors and architectures for its software. Don't get me wrong, Apple hardware is great. However, there's nothing quite like building your own computer, an option long denied to Mac users. This appears to open up that possibility to some extent, and I am quite happy.
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Instead of "porting" Darwin to x86 and running it on a bog-standard Crusoe, why not talk the Crusoe into being a G4 instead of an x86? I was under the impression that the Crusoe's code-morphing software could be reworked to emulate other instruction sets besides x86 ...
I don't think the latest generation of Apple machines (slot-loading iMac, iBook and PowerMac G4) have any ROM on the mobo at all. Might even be more machines than that. Mac OS X definitely doesn't use this system, though.
I have to say, anyone that recommends Shreve Systems to buy Mac gear has never used them, or their last name is Shreve. The place is horrible, has high prices, has been in trouble with the BBB and used Mac buyers all around the country. I would be far more trustworthy of the many deals on eBay with the positive feedback ratings in the hundreds selling great Mac gear at unbelievable prices... probably 25-30% of that you would pay at Shreve. My recommendations for a good, used PPC Mac - buy the cheapest PowerMac 7500 you can. As a base unit, it only has a 100 MHz 601 Chip (1st generation) but it is the only 601-based PPC Mac that has the processor daughtercard (with G3 daughtercards starting at $200, true plug and play) and the only 601-based PPC with PCI. Plug in your VooDoo 2/3, NICs.. whatever. Plus BeOS needs the PCI to run, and it will run all the good Linix versions for Mac. a base 7500 should set you back $300.. maybe less.. complete with ram, hard drive, keyboard, mouse.
www.jackasscritics.com
Remember, this is the same MOSR that said the iBook would have a hand crank for charging the battery, the same one that constantly prints things like "This has no confirmation from anyone at Apple, but it sounds good." and so forth. Take anything and everything from them with a large grain of salt.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That being said - i was with apple sticking with the PPC for a long time.. but now, with almost a _year_ of failure... i'm beginning to believe that there needs to be another way to power our Macs. We have almost 12 months of proof that Motorola can't cut it. Hell, they care 20 times more about embedded processors - and are simply not _that_ interested in high end PPCs.
Now, if you want some _honest_ reporting of what's going on, besides the bong resin i spewed out on my page, go read about the G4 mess over at AppleInsider. It tells about the problems that Apple is having with Mot and how they went begging to IBM to make AltiVec enabled PPCs.
I do think that Apple is in real trouble with the PPC series.. and its not the technology, its the companies involved.
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Black light Media is looking for some good advertisers!
And oh, how I cried when Apple let things tank, and pulled the PowerComputing licenses. It may have been an early part of the master-plan for the surge in Apple sales and ownership, but it still put a stake in my gut.
But I really hope that Apple is considering this, and it's not just a wet-dream/media-jerk from the guys at MOSR. If Apple does commit itself to developing for the Crusoe processor, I'm going to be the first on my block to get my little mits on it one and boot up my favorite OS on something besides a piece of Motorola silicon.
Oh, happy days...
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
If indeed this rumor has any merit, the R&D department is probaby just taking a look at what might be done with the processor. Maybe they are looking at it for use in a handheld or an iBook-like portable?
Who knows what might be behind this.. Apple has managed to keep a pretty tight lid on their R&D group lately, they managed to keep the Aqua interface completely hidden from public view until Steve Jobs's keynote at MacWorld.
I was not able to get to the MOSR site to read the full rumor, so this is all my speculation of speculation and based on what everyone else has posted. I've been reading MacOS Rumors for a couple of years now, sometiumes they have a story with a bit of truth, but often the rumors never turn out to be true.
Ok I'm going to play devil's advocate and try and look at it from Apple's viewpoint. I don't think they can afford to port MacOS X to x86 due to previously mentioned hardware sales, BUT they always "secured" that by keeping the MacOS ROM veiled in mystery and secret. I imagine that the big "no go" here is that Apple just finished UMA chipset for use in the new iMacs, Powerbooks, and Sawtooths. I'm not an engineer, just a biology student, but I would think putting a x86 chip on a MB designed for RISC, I know the "categories" are useless/blurring, would require some design changes. That would be on a design I imagine that has already cost them some money and quite a bit of time to get where they wanted...it was primarly for cost reasons as far as I know. That's why the iMac's are slowly coming down in price along with a predicted drop in the iBook's price. Yep and I have to agree that Apple doesn't have the touch of death on technology either. SCSI is far from dead, the number of digital video devices using Firewire is growing (Sony even gave it its own product name), and wireless networks are becoming within range of multi-computer homes in terms of price. Anyway that's just my .02 or .03.
Think about it... Darwin comes with QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS). Apple can make QTSS the standard for streaming media serving porting Darwin to non-PPC hardware. It would be a serious threat to M$ Media Player and RealNetworks. Don't even think about Apple porting Mac OS X, it will never happen.
That's a sad thing to think.
Jobs worked at Atari for a while, and during that time the Woz was at HP. Jobs had just talked his way into the job and while he had some technical skills, he's never been a hacker by any standard (unless you count social engineering).
So when the assignment came in for Breakout, Jobs told Bushnell no problem. Then he secretly got the Woz to do all the real work at night (after putting in a full day at HP - the man didn't sleep for days). Worse, Bushnell had promised Jobs a bonus if he minimized the number of chips on the board. Jobs offered to split it with the Woz 50-50, but when the $5000 bonus came in (a masterpiece of IC conservation) Jobs only gave the Woz $250.
The lessons of this story are:
*Steve Jobs is an incredible jerk
*The Woz is an incredible engineer
*Atari had trouble figuring out how Breakout _worked, it was so tightly built
*Apple might have used Intel chips if Woz had had more cash on hand when building the Apple I (who knows?)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Please try and pay attention to how you phrase things. /. has lots of gay readers that don't want their sexual orientation to automatically mean stupid\silly\strange.
Thanks.
Yes, maybe the great Carmack will save Linux users from the dozens of undocumented winmodem chipsets. I'd rather have him work on more worthy products, like video drivers, myself.
Or maybe people will just go out and buy real modems.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
almost right: it's pong that you can play in OF. You can play breakout in macsbug, if you like.
btw, if that sort of computerised residual brainstem activity appeals, then you'll probably also want the interface hack that renders the MacOS interface into ascii art.
Um, small point here -- and totally meaningless in the "real world", but AltiVec does not mean G4.
:-D).
The G4 has a lot of enhancements besides AV, and AV could theoretically been retrofitted into a G3.
More importantly, the G3 was pretty close to a PPC 603e chip -- great integer performance but so-so floating point scores. Of course, the FP scores of a 603e still trounced Pentiums at the time, so it was deliciously ironic to hear PC lovers talking about "crippled" FP in the G3. Other enhancements to the G3 carried the FP scores forward even though no major effort was made to make FP gains.
I could be wrong, but I think the G4 is closer to the PowerPC 604e. Among the similarities is SMP - multiprocessor support. Apple gave up on SMP in MacOS long ago, but the BSD kernel in Mac OS X is more than up to it.
Lastly, the MacOS is probably MORE portable thank Linux. MacOS has been under a major rewrite for the last 2 years. Much of the MacOS is tied to just a few libraries, most prominent of the group is QuickTime (update that library for AV support and lotsa linked apps get a kick in the ass). Apple has been preparing for a move to MacOS X, and afterwards a move to 64-bit, for quite some time. Apple does not want to maintain two OS trees indefinately, like some other OS companies we know of...
Lastly, people have already forgotton that MacOS X did beta in an Intel version. Remember Rhapsody? I saw it and actually fought to try installing it on three PC's (lovely... hardware conflicts with a Mac
For all that Apple still doesn't do (no bundled development tools... grrr), they have made the best of their situation.... better than any of their "wut no floppie drive" detractors. Nice clean systems with no ribbon cables strewn across 3 or four internal case/CPU fans.
Anyways, I got off the track, but last thing is Apple has an amazing record of making quite varied hardware APPEAR to be what they've used before. Just ask the LinuxPPC coders how varied the Apple hardware is. For all the MacOS glitches over the year, they have the flexibility to do anything they like with their systems... things that Microsoft and Intel can only immitate. If Apple wants to move onto Transmeta or even Intel, you can bet those new systems will never have the same problems as Windows/WinCE on same platforms.
Scott
PS _ Does anyone know if BSD on PowerPC can run Linux/PPC binaries, like say BSD/x86 can run Linux binaries?? This would be real interesting if someone starts shipping PowerPC Linux boxes (plain vanilla), and you can target BSD and still execute the binary under MacOS Consumer...
How exactly is Firewire dead? Is anybody editing digital video without Firewire? Or is it that you figure the demand for editing digital video may diminish in the future somehow?
Between Apple, Sony and Compaq, Firewire is on about 20% of personal computers shipping today. It's on 100% of the digital camcorders ever made, it's on TiVo's set-top boxes, and there are numerous manufacturers of hard drives, DAT's, CD-RW's, etc. and even printers.
I can't find a single competing technology - let alone another open one. What counts for "dead"? Not having 90% of the x86 market? Not being implemented on Linux? (It's coming in the 2.4 kernel.)
Why am I responding to an idiot's flamebait?
Does anyone here actually thing thak Apple Inc. (notice the "Computer" is gone) is actually going to waste time and money on porting Darwin to other architectures? OF COURSE NOT!
The whole POINT of Darwin is that it is under the APSL... Apple has ALREADY been encouraging developers to port Darwin to any platform they feel like. There is already a Darwin source compileable on Linux/x86. The only reason there aren't others is because all Darwin developement is pretty much on hold until DP3 is released and the Darwin codebase is synched with MacOS X.
When that happens we will have Mach 3.0, IOKit (Driver builder) and all the new tools/features that MacOS X has (and grow with) so we can effectively start porting Darwin to x86 (again, the source is already there), Sparc, MIPS, IA-64... whatever! Apple doesn't care. They don't have to do the work, they just manage the results and fold the changes back into MacOS X (and vice versa).
There is no doubt in my mind that by this time next year Darwin will be running on x86 and at least one or two other "Alternative" platforms (most likely SPARC and Alpha). Unless MacOS X dies, I don't see why Darwin wouldn't be on all relevant platforms within 2-3 years.
The trick to all this of course is whether Apple will:
Effectively making MacOS X a fully portable operting system not dependant on hardware, only on Darwin.
You can get CHRP motherboards from IBM with G3 processors (G4s will come soon, as IBM has started to manufacture them). They have all the specs and parts available, with 133MHz bus, Gigabit ethernet, AGP, and more standard. The G3 is still being developed for embedded and computing purposes, and it's speed is said to increase to 550-600MHz, as well as power consumption to decrease. Wouldn't it be nice to have a sweet 600MHz G3 laptop with LinuxPPC running on it (the Mobo doesn't support the MacOS, or the other way around; this may change with OSX and Darwin, where something might be able to be hacked up . . .). I remember reading about this, but can't find any info on IBM's site about it. I hope I didn't read about it on MOSR (joke).
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Actually anyone can buy the parts from Motorola to create PPC motherboards. That doesn't mean the motherboard is going to run MacOS though.
LinuxPPC currently runs on Mac, BeOS, PReP, CHRP, MTX (type of PReP), and some other PPC boards.
The key with running MacOS is to get Apple's support and they canned that a while back.
--Mark
Most Linux users wouldn't buy an OSX layer from Apple, I don't think. Putting it on top of Linux gains them nothing that putting it on top of BSD wouldn't. BSD, while less compatible than linux, and somewhat less user-friendly, is more stable in development (I mean codebase stability, not OS stability) and has better performance in some areas. The Mach microkernel offers significant advantages over the linux kernel for Apple, since Avie is one of the people who created Mach in the first place, and NeXT/OpenStep used Mach primitives in a lot of its low-level stuff. Porting to run on top of linux, unless they brought back mkLinux, would therefore be definitely non-trivial and not necessarily useful.
As for mindshare, Apple is getting plenty. Linux wouldn't help it in it's target market, which is consumers, education, science, and graphics professionals.
Umm... I think you mistunderstand things a little...the G3 PowerBooks may not be the Mhz kings anymore, but they are still the fastest/among the fastest portable computers out there, and with the rumors of a impending speed bump/upgrade to the PowerBook line, Apple might jut be moving back into that position, now that Motorolla has been talking about 500-600 Mhz G3's.. one has to wonder..
<p>And then when you consider that Transmeda has not been making claims that they would be competing in the speed areana, but instead makeing reasonably fast processors at low power settings, thi does not sound like a product where Apple would be interested in for their Pro lines, and since they are now beginnning to see major cost saving s from the Unified Motherboard Architcture (UMA), suddenly this sounds like a Really Bad Idea(tm)...</p>
It woudl be even more interesting to see Mac on a Sparc chip or an 1000Mhz Alpha. Now that would be speed in style. Think of the graphic capabilities that would have.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
What I would REALLY love to see is motorola allowing MB manufacturers to manufacture MBs for their G3/4 chips. Unless I am wrong (someone correct me if I am), the only way to get a MB that supports a Motorola chip is to buy it from Apple or one of the embedded system companies who have specialized boards. I love the G3/4 processors, but I hate having to go through Apple to get one, and then be stuck with their hardware setup. I know Mac is a good OS for its purposes, but its not my OS of choice. I'd rather be running Linux PPC. Motorola must have some deal with Apple to not allow generic MBs to be manufactured by 3rd parties.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
I'm a little skeptical that after all this time Apple's looking to go x86, even on a Crusoe. A Crusoe variant "emulating" a PPC is another story. MacOS X itself, as in the BSD/Darwin layers, is a reasonable enough proposal for it, but the sticking point would remain the legacy OS 9 emulation layer. Software-based emulation would certainly work, but it wouldn't be fast enough.
Of course, in the original switch from 680x0 processors to the PPC, Apple managed to pull off the transition with exactly that: software emulation and a period of hybrid ("fat") binaries until PPC-native apps became the norm. So who knows.
On the other hand, assuming IBM can pump out Crusoes quickly enough, a multi-Crusoe machine might be cheaper to build than a G4. And a Crusoe tweaked to do its microcode translation magic on the G3/G4 instruction set could make things mighty interesting.
Since Jobs took over, Apple has been running a very tight ship - no leaks. Hence, rumor sites have had no reliable source of information, and read more like the Weekly World News, where everything is made up. Don't believe it.
Apple's engineers/management were too stupid/lazy to write the toolbox natively, eh?
You really have absolutely no idea as to how closely the original MacOS was tied to the 68k architecture. It absolutely depended on specific features of that one particular processor, and there was no real way to break them apart other than emulating the 68k processor or making a whole new OS. Of course, Apple did try that second strategy, about three or four times as I recall. They're finally getting it done, but it's not easy. Making the original OS completely native would have been basically an impossible task, though.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Darwin is NEXTSTEP.
All things considered, Darwin is NOT NEXTSTEP directly... Darwin is a very close descendant of NeXT's offering, but the 2 are not "equal" by any means.
But aside from that... the rumor is likely crap, as you say. The atmosphere at Apple is such that there is a <i>very good possibility</i> that someone in Engineering is toying around with other processors... but it is almost certain that he's not acting officially for Apple in any way.
woof!
Just in case anyone was confused. Should be funny, not informative.
Apple change processors now and waste money "porting" Darwin to other chips? Mr.AlternaOS programmer can download the source and port it to his favourite ISA. I can't see Apple developing on more than one ISA at a time, just like the other software+hardware vendors like Sun, IBM, and SGI (does SGI count anymore?). If you're having wet dreams about OS X on x86 just look back before the Mac was released, the Apple camp was divided between the Mac developers and the guys working on the older Apple stuff and caused alot of problems within the company, shortly thereafter Jobs got handed a pink slip. I don't put very much faith into the Mac rumours sites, most of their rumours are started by people that WISH something would happen and it picks up from there. Ford doesn't make Chevys, why would Apple make PCs?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You can install hundreds of applications on mac os and it won't screw up anything. Can't do that with windows. I've tried that. With windows, installing anything else besides windows runs the chance of screwing up the registry and the system will either not boot (worse than crashing) or will crash in the same exact way every time the offending action is committed. And remember, mac os has Protected Configuration--configuration data for each program in a seperate file. If configuration data for one program is corrupted, the configuration data for the others remains intact. Just like with linux. Windows bundles the configuration in one file. If while writing configuration data for one program there is a bad write to a registry file, the configuration of many programs might be toasted. /etc. Finally, mac os has far less shared code than windows or linux. On a mac, you install a program or hardware and it doesn't install files other places that screw things up, or tell you "I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid the code for your mp3 player conflicts with netscape. No music for you!"
The place where mac os really shines, however, is that configuration files are not at all required for programs to run, since they will be instantly regenerated if not found. I dare anyone to delete system.dat or type rm -rf
Desktop users are most concerned with stuff not working. They want an os that is not easy to screw up and will let them add stuff without penalty. Windows and Linux have not yet satisfied those conditions. Windows never will because microsoft will never open up the code to anyone competant enough to change it. Linux, on the other hand, allows somebody to fix its bugs.
>> you mean these Mac OS Rumors are _Rumors_ in the sense of Rumors, not Rumors in the sense of verified fact?
Naa, its just a Rumor.
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
They have had more than one suck-style parody over the years... I know of three, there may have been others. Generally they last for a couple of months, then are given up as it requires too much work.
That's my whole point. How can I read content on a site to judge that site when that site can't deliver the content I'm supposed to judge? And as for how well it "loads up", yes, I'm sorry if my standards are so high that I expect it to load a page on request, not barf all over the page with raw error messages. Most sites that even attempt some degree of cluefullness will present a page saying, in plain english (or whatever native language you understand) that an error has occurred. More enlightened sites will provide a link back to the front page, and even a helpful link to send a message about the error to the web admin. But then I guess that's too much to expect from high-church geeks.
I can hear it now:
"Error recovery? ERROR RECOVERY??? We don't need no stinkin' error recovery!"
I wish there could be the MacOS X for IBM PC clones.
The NT has many problems in management, and with Windows platform, it's pretty time-consuming to upgrade/reinstall OS. Because it causes you install all S/W again.
Linux? I like it, but it also requires more time to setup than Windows/Mac.
Sure, they get misinformation sometimes, but they don't misrepresent it as fact, and the correct information far outweighs the errors.
It's conceivable that Apple could work with Transmeta to make a PowerPC clone. But that's what it would have to be - same architecture, same instruction set, different chip.
I remember thinking awhile back that AMD would make an interesting addition to the Apple-IBM-Motorola partnership - after all, AMD already licences technology from Motorola, and vice-versa I think.
<!--#include file=".signature" -->
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
No, actually I don't misunderstand your point. Sadly, I think I didn't explain my point that well. My point is that laptops are not expected to be as fast as desktops, even in the pro market. (The same point Transmeta makes with thier webpads, etc.)
This may be a cheap way to bring a low Mhz, low power etc laptop to the masses. It seems to me,
that you combine the low power of a transmeta chip with an emulated G4 (including altivec which the chip should be able to handle fairly well considering that the chip is VLIW...) and you have a very powerful,cheap,light,long battery life for the power user on the go. If you could get an "AltiVec enabled Photoshop Pad" or an apple branded webpad, or an Ibook for say $600, would you really care about the Mhz? Most consumers wouldn't....
Not only that it would fulfill Jobs vision of making Apple the sony of the computer world. (Not the market leader in $$$, but the market maker...)
As for the UMA, all that it would require is UMA3 have slots for the extra chips and what ever... Remember that as far as the rest of the machine cares the only difference is in the pins.
I'm not saying that the rumor is true, I'm just saying there is more sense to it than some people believe.
Myddrin
No, that won't work exactly. Darwin certainly can be ported to other platforms (it was ported TO the Mac originally after all from NeXT). The problem is that a lot of the stuff that makes MacOS X different from Darwin (Blue Box, Carbon, Quartz, Cocoa, and Aqua come to mind offhand) will not be ported. An enterprising programmer might get X running on Darwin (John Carmack of ID has already expressed interest in working on it), but:
(X + Aqua themed GNOME) != (Quartz + Aqua)
- Vincit qui patitur.
Oh my. My feelings are hurt. Lets see, go to Netcraft and look at what www.macosrumors.com is running, and I see:
www.macosrumors.com is running Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14 on FreeBSD
Gosh. And I thought FreeBSDers were so much better, so much more knowledgable, so much cooler, than us lowlife Linux fucks. I guess what amazes me is why a site devoted to the MacOS isn't hosted on MacOS with a MacOS server...
> A Pentium 166 runs MacOS 6 apps like a Mac IIfx under DOS. Think of what it'd be like on a PIII equivalent.
I'm sort of confused by this. Does this mean that your P166 ran like a IIfx running DOS apps? I vaguely remember running SoftDOS on a Mac LC several years ago, it was about as slow as a glacier. Now a IIfx is a couple times faster than a LC. Now I think that a IIfx running DOS apps would be about as slow as warm tar. So did your P166 run about as fast as warm tar? If so why didn't you just save yourself the trouble and throw your P166 into warm tar?
Or does this mean that on a PIII, Executor would be as fast as a Quadra 650 under _System_ 6? In other words, does this just mean that a PIII would be able to run apps that I would never want to use at a slower speed than my PowerMac 6500?
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Mac OS is pretty stable these days. Apps bail from time to time, true; however, I have never once had to reinstall MacOS (not counting upgrades, obviously) and my Macs have not been treated with kid gloves. In a long-term sense, it's definitely more stable than Windows -- and it was even in the Dark Times of System 7.5 and the PowerPC shift.
But that wouldn't be a Mac. It'd be a bastardized Mac-like implentation. No matter how much you try to justify it, it they just no longer would be the Mac's that we've known. A lot of the Mac OS' ease of use comes from it's closeness to the hardware. Things like Plug and Play (which apple never bothered to name as such) work much better on every iteration of mac compared to PC's. They also do USB much better than PC's. That's not just beacuse of a couple extensions to the Mac OS. It's beacause Apple knows EXACTLY what chips to expect in each Mac system, as well as tolerances of things like motherboards and cables. Microsoft can have pretty much no assurances that vendor A's USB implentation is anything like vendor B's (especially so the smaller the vendor is)... they may even use the same chipset, but place them at different distances from the PCI brideg chips, messing up the timing...
But you are assuming that the port would be to the x86 instruction set. If (as the engineers at Transmetat have admitted could be done) the Apple-Cursoe is given the software to emulate a G4 instead of x86, (with an exculsive licensce to apple of course).... you see where I'm going, right?
There would be a lot of value to apple in at least considering this. Remember Jobs wants to be the Sony of the computer world (not the market leader in sales, but in innovation). This would really get them a _lot_ of cheap publicity while saving them $100+ per chip.
Of course, a Apple-Curose combo would obviously only happen in the laptop area, where speed is less important than power consumption and heat!!
Just picture an iBook running macos or linux of *BSD that can last 24+ hrs on a single battery charge. This could really explode the apple brand.
Again, if the rumor is true.
Myddrin
they (apple) still a major shareholder in ARM
intrestingly palm said to be apples handheld OS
anyone can see it
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Well, not knowing too much about the performance of the Crusoe, I can't really say whether it would be a good alternative to a G4. However...
Compatability problems? Depending on the correctness of the Crusoe software, it could well be a good thing. If there was a problem with some kinds of software running on the beast, that would damage Crusoe's reputation for cross-platform software running.
Incidentally, has anyone considered the possibility of doing Crusoe-style code morphing in software (sort of a non-Java virtual machine)?
Game dev and music blog
Please repost your comment with a link to the story you're referenceing...
I'd tend to think, without being able to read it, that FreeMac was looking for some sort of credit line from apple, which of course they're not going to give, because how in the world would FreeMac pay apple back?
2nd. Yes, apple makes oney from their hardware. And it is their main revenue stream. Those two are granted. However, Apple would lose 1/2 their advantage by porting their OS to x86... Users would have to deal with IRQ's... slews of unsupported hardware...etc. No one would ever pat apple on the back for making some of the best hardware anymore... And lots of people post here that they LOVE Mac hardware, they just don't like the OS on it.
Back when Apple realized that Moto's 68k series of CPU's was at the end of its performance envelope, they started searching out for a replacement CPU.
They expressed interest in Digital's Alpha, but whoever was running the show at DEC back then, "Didn't think there was a future in desktops."
Oh what COULD HAVE BEEN!
Reminds me of when Digital "Didn't think there was a future in Unix."
JAAC
I have always had faith in Apple, as far as software development goes. MacOS is a clean, effecient piece of work, with a strong (and much-needed) emphasis on usability and stability. MacOSX expands on this by providing the functionality of the NeXT GUI platform. Apple and MacOS are rapidly evolving into the future of consumer personal computing, however, they have been hindered by uncooperative and unproductive business partnerships in hardware. This is a much better model for them : stick to the software. Altough they have had some glorious success in the consumer hardware arena, I would definetely recommend their new strategy ; they will be no longer tied to hardware companies for their production needs. Another interesting thing that this may signify is a shift to the embedded systems market, something Apple has previously stayed of, aside from the Newton, which was really about a decade ahead of its time. If they are capable of carrying over the easy of use and functionality that popularized MacOS in the 80s into the embedded consumer market, they stand a fair chance at positioning Darwin/MacOS as the preeminent consumer OS of the next decade.
- Dave "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy" - Steve Jobs
Technically, sortof, the current Apple line runs on IBM processors.
The PowerPC is, at it's heart, and IBM "Power" series processor.
And those AltiVec instructions in the G4 that are supposed to make multimedia so fast. They're vector algebra functions that IBM added to their version of the ppc, this was actually the point of divergence last year when IBM and Motorola were going to go their separate ways because IBM wanted better math and Motorola wanted better multimedia. Motorola ended up tossing their multimedia extnesions in favor of ibm's math extensions.
I'm not saying Motorola didn't make a significant contribution, I'm saying that their contribution was mostly in making a Power series processor financially viable for mass production.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
What? You mean you're supposed to check return values?!? But I thought "Slash" 0.9 code was the product of hardcore "geeks"! Oh, I'm so disillusioned!
They don't claim to be any more than that.
Actually, they've hit a few things right in the past. But they also get hit with disinformation from many sources, including Apple. At least they give us a chance to judge for ourselves.
When they add the word "Facts" or "News" to their name, then we can get pissed.
--
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I have always thought /. readers were more technically savy. Looking through these posts, I see there are a surprising number of people who think that Crusoe is yet-another-chip that one has to port their software too. In fact, Crusoe has a software layer called Code Morphing that allows it to emulate x86. There is no need to mess with the underlying instruction set (I don't even think it's published).
Therefore, you don't have to port Intel-based apps to Crusoe any more than you have to port them to AMD.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
A lot of folks here have been complaining that ./ is running a story from Ryan Meaders website.
/. each day that referenced mosr.com, that means he'd be /.'d every single day...
But if you think about it - if we ran a story on
so, i promise to do may part, and each day, sumbit a story to slashdot telling everyone about something new that Ryan Meader is talking about. Won't you join me in my fight against stupidity on the web via non-violent means?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
If Transmeta were to get a cash infusion from Apple, I'm sure they'd be happy to put some ressources into emulating G3 and G4's (and 680x0's too ...) in "software" for the Crusoe.
After all, Apple would be better off getting the 'experts' to do the porting (emulation) part, and then just test the results. If nothing else, this would allow for easier creation of Apple clones, as long as Apple licensed the OS.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
the Breakout egg was in system 7.5 only. It was actually rather clever; it would print out on the screen "mac os 7.5 by: " and then a list of names. except each individual word in the list of names had a different blackground color to it, and made up a different block in the breakout game. Once you got rid of all the blocks, it would refill the screen with blocks made up of different names. If you got rid of that screen it would take you back to the first.
The egg was triggered by mac os drag&drop, which appeared for the first time in macos 7.5.. you typed out "secret about box" in some app that supported d&d, then held down option and dragged the text to the desktop. This is, btw, the same way you triggered the infamous 3d-rendered Iguana Flag easter egg in the PPC versions of 7.5.3, which is still one of the most amazing things i've ever seen.
supposedly there was some way to use resedit to extract the breakout game from the 7.5 system suitcase-- it was a desk accessory resource, i think-- and insert it into a copy of some other desk accessory, such as calculator, and thus have it be a standalone program that you could take to non-7.5 machines. never got around to trying this though.
this is the kind of crud i spent my childhood being fascinated by.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The currently released version of Darwin is in the process of a very heavy evolution, with a lot of tweaking and tuning going on. this is primarily oriented towards the PPC. The point is, that when the UMA-II chipsets come along, the version of Darwin will change significantly (public announcements of this fact are one of the reasons for very little, and then only very restrained efforts with Darwin to date). This porting effort serves a lot of alternative ideas probably cooking around at Apple (the would be cooking around if I were in charge). First of all they are telling Motorola to get its shit together (the PPC is not large on their corporate horizons, and probably only generate a fraction of revenue that cell phones, embedded processors, etc. do). It also opens the possibility of future markets for the Mac OS.
For the community, this means there will be a mach kernel out there which it should be very easy to hang a microkernel Linux on (with boot times in seconds, and the other potential advantages of Darwin). There should also be a readily available microkernel FreeBSD very close to hand, since OSX is FreeBSD based. This all bodes very well for those who can live with the APSL license of Darwin, as it encourages not only Linux and *BSD, but it promises portability from architecture to architecture--got a new architecture, so just port Darwin, then do some tuning for performance.
Darwin is an extremely non-trivial piece of code, and this work means Apple is putting some significant money into projects that will make the lives of many in the free software movement easier.
All 'New World' Macs have the old hardware ROM in RAM (loaded from 'MacOS ROM' file in system folder at boot time).
So the ROM is not 'slowly being moved into a system file which gets loaded into RAM.' It happened very quickly. All new Macs since the iMac and Blue & White G3s do this in MacOS 8.5 and up.
Also, given that Mac OS X boots on x86 already, I'd say most of the difficulties of hardware/software dependency are already in the past. Now it's just a matter of writing any new drivers cleanly.
Crusoe is a very clever device, but it's not going to beat a hardwired array processor for the kinds of SIMD work that Altivec does.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>the roll your own crowd.
that market isn't as attractive as you might think. it's composed largely of people who want to buy components on the cheap. the margins there are thin, and strongly susceptible to economies of scale. if you're not one of the really big fish in that market, or one of the hyerspecialized little fish, you're fish food. that's why we're unlikely ever to see a vertically integrated hardware/OS/software vendor in the x86 clone market.
Apple's marketing is strongly based on transparent hardware support and ease of use.. "it works, right out of the box", "this is the manual you get with a Mac", "there is no step three", etc. that requires tight synchronization between hardware and software, and the roll your own crowd could traditionally care less about that. they want to build what's cheap, not bow down before someone's list of officially approved hardware. the last thing Apple needs is to have its brand shot down by a proliferation of nightmare boxes built by people who don't give a damn about Apple specs.
besides, it costs like hell to support umpty-seven different permutations of hardware at all, let alone reliably. Microsoft has trouble doing it, and they're just a tad bigger than Apple is. you even hear occasional stories about Linux users not being able to get a certain hardware configuration to work, and we have a fairly decent amount of support, too.
so when you take the various factors into account.. loss of margins on the hardware side, negative branding from noncompliant hardware in the marketplace, and a geometric increase in the cost of support on the software side.. you'd have to buy a whole lot of Apple-produced software to offset what you'd cost them.
just between you, me, and the fencepost error, i don't think you were planning to spend more than a couple $K on software, were you?
I take these rumours about a port of MacOS to a different processor with a truckload of salt. However, one argument being made against the likelihood of such a port rings false.
There is absolutely no reason that a x86 (or IA-64) system would have to be open. Apple could control the hardware exactly as it does now, regardless of processor. MacOS would not run on standard PC motherboards. Apple would lose no hardware sales, nor would it in any way change its business model. There would be, of course, major issues along the 68K -> PowerPC change, but that's an entirely different issue.
Of course, there would be the difficulty with the perception that just because the Apple happened to be use the same processor that the motherboards should be "compatible". But that's marketing perception, not a physical reality.
Porting to Crusoe would indeed at this time mean porting to x86. But that other, really interesting bit of info in that rumour article would indeed need porting to a new platform:
... -- and tenuous evidence suggests that AMD may also have shown interest in supporting Darwin with a modified version of its Athlon processor that has been stripped of its x86 emulation hardware.
Now maybe this is old news for some, but I didn't know that AMD seriously considered stripping the Athlon of its x86 legacy stuff. Such a processor couldThe G3 and G4 are Not Motorola chips. They are AIM chips. (AIM = Apple, IBM, Motorola).
The last original microprocessor family designed solely by Motorola was the 88000 RISC series.
While this Would Be A Good Thing, it's not quite this simple. The motherboard would have to include the Apple ROM, which is one of the primary keys to getting MacOS to run on other hardware archs. There is also the matter of the device support. MacOS MoBoards have so much on them: 16bit sound, Firewire, etc. old Macs has SCSI-1, video, etc. on the board also. Finally, the BIOS for MacOS is their own product called OpenFirmware, which they would have to either write around or release compatability info on.
Now don't get me wrong, the MacOS hardware software dependency is going towards something where this may be possible. For instance:
The ROM is slowly being moved into a system file which gets loaded into RAM. MacOSX doesn't (read: "shouldn't") access the ROM at all, I believe (Yay!)
Video and SCSI are now off the board. Video is going to be standard AGP (as in Sawtooth G4's) rather than on-board or in a special 66MHz yet 32 bit PCI slot.
MacOSX early versions/Rhapsody Dr's were released under certain x86 platforms already. MOSR had a report of someone seeing a Rhapsody DR at Cupertino(sp?) running on a Sun SPARc 4.
So there are hurdles to overcome, but Apple has been overcoming them slowly anyway. The most likely thing that I would see happening is Apple making motherboards based on their hardware for different CPU (AMD-Motorola alliance crossed with Apple-Moto-IBM's 'AIM' alliance may yield something interesting...K7's maybe?) would probably be the most likely outcome.
In this case, you will still have a premade system from Apple then build on it.
- Sig
This doesn't make much sense to me. Apple is under a lot of strain right now to bring to fruition several key efforts, all of them PowerPC based. Mac OS X. Mac OS 9.0.1/9.0.2. New PowerBooks. And, Apple has gone to significant time and expense to promote PowerPC G3 and G4 processors. Why pull resources away from these key efforts, and why do it after all of that cheerleading for the PowerPC?
Besides, Darwin may be more of a slick marketing move by Apple to court the Linux crowd than a genuine commitment to open sourcing and support for multiple processors.
If Apple is indeed looking at Crusoe, then I agree with an earlier post that guessed this was done to frighten Motorola. Apple wants Moto to speed up the PowerPC line and might think a little saber rattling is in order.
That's the thing- Darwin isn't NeXTSTEP. It was derived from the underlying BSD of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep/Mach, but that doesn't make it NeXTSTEP. Signifigant changes have taken place, including a new version of the Mach kernel between OpenStep 4.2 and what is now called Mac OS X. I personally haven't looked at the Darwin source yet. Apple might've maintianed the i386 port, but there's an equal chance that they let it die in upgrading the BSD system. While it probably wouldn't be that hard to have a Darwin/Intel, it's not a trivial matter.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
OpenFirmware is NOT an Apple product. It's an IEEE standard. OpenFirmware.org
--
"I was a fool to think I could dream as a normal man."
That site posts stuff that is way out there. Sometimes its like they are just making it up. I guess that fitst the "rumors" title though. Anyhow, I wouldn't believe whats posted on Mac OS Rumors. Its better to wait and here it on a site you can trust.
On Macintoshes, you can access it by holding down Command-Option-O-F while booting. On Suns, it's Stop-A. I believe someone actually wrote a Forth version of Breakout that could run on Apple's OF implementation. Pretty neat trick for a boot monitor, imho.
Some PCI devices even have Forth driver code in their ROMs.
Despite the obvious drawbacks of being dead for decades, the famed biologist was available for comments on Dafoe's seminal work. He noted "Yeah, being stranded on an island is one thing, spending all of your waking hours classifying Finches is another. I don't understand why the author didn't take the time to incorporate this aspect into this otherwise classic work of fiction." Wakka wakka wakka.
We don't just argue it, we experience it in real life.
I haven't had a system crash on my Mac in more than a year of use with apps such as:
Yes, the apps dump every once in a while (especially GoLive), but they don't bring the system down with them.
I do restart once every week or two, just to clean up the stray RAM caused by memory leaks and such.
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Ahh, damn, sorry -- I was rushing out the door to lunch with some folks and didn't doublecheck the link. Here's the C|net story about FreeMac's frustrations with Apple, doublechecked this time: http://news.cnet. com/news/0-1006-200-1540302.html?tag=st.ne.1002.
And no, FreeMac didn't want a credit line or anything -- they just wanted to buy the computers, even if that meant buying them from a reseller or from a retailer like CompUSA. Check out the article now that I've finally posted the URL correctly, it's interesting.
Normally I'm not one to speak about the quality of posts to slashdot. But this story has me irked, not so much the story itself but the "update." Saying anything from MacOSRumors.com is true and using an anonymous source to do so seems rather unprofessional. MacOSrumors.com is just that, Macintosh Operating System RUMORS. They're not operating under any false pretenses of truth. Nor will an "anonymous source" be enough to elevate one of their stories into the realm of truth. An appeal to anonymous authority is a logical fallacy and this makes /. look very bad IMO. I say disregard the update until we hear who this anonymous source is. Take it as a rumor and ONLY as a rumor. Just my thoughts.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Isn't the point of Crusoe that you don't need to change the OS? If Transmeta decides to go after the PPC market couldn't they just put out a software PPC compatibility layer? After all, the rest of the motherboard on macs is pretty standard these days.
At that point, a PPC software layer/Mac OS bundle would reduce the price risk of moving to Mac to $140 and net Apple an entire new market.
DB
If you consider the fact that Apple (not Apple Computer), once sat on tons of invenotry and was horribly unprofitable, it makes total sense to brag about the small, mobile inventory that returned your company to the black.
Any specualtion on Apple using non-PPC based chips is merely that. It's a kick in the pants for the PPC guild.
It's not just the chips/kernel that allow the new MacOSX to be what it is. Look at the Quartz display/OpenGL combo, and you have a great setup for Apple's core customers, the creative professionals.
Any designer worth his Pantone Book/Hex Code Chart...(witty designer humor?) is not willing to turn their back on the core technologies that are going to make OSX what it is. Darwin is NOT OSX and anyone who thinks it is probably doesn't know the difference between (insert computer literate acronym)and (insert computer literate acronym).
-digital media will kill us all
Open Firmware is IEEE 1275. The home page is
http://playground.sun.com/1275/
The idea behind Open Firmware came from Sun during their transition from MC68000 CPUs to SPARC. Problem: two different CPU architectures, and you want to write add-in board device drivers just once, rather than N times for N different processors.
Solution: put an interpreter on the motherboard, written native for the processor on the motherboard, and write the drivers for the peripheral boards (which go into PROMs on the peripheral boards) in the interpreted language. This way, the system can boot from devices that were never envisioned when the motherboard was designed.
This is a standard that WinTel world would do well to adopt.
Yes, Crusoe is sexy right now. It runs at 400-700 Mhz, but how does that translate to the real world? How many instructions per cycle does it perform? Could it really support the types of image manipulations provided by Quartz for MacOS X, which I belive MacOS Rumors is implying will run on top of this port of Darwin?
How hard would it be to port Darwin to Crusoe, anyway? Not much, I suppose... not to mention that they'll be able to take advantage of the experience with Mobile Linux. OTOH, given that it's been months since Darwin was released and it still hasn't been ported even to Intel, maybe there's a catch involved.
:)
Anyway, I'm not really sure about what this means for Apple. Will they be opening their architecture - and furthermore, will they do it the right way this time around? Speculation, speculation. All I know is that I want my quad-G4 box!!!!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Maybe Netcraft is seeing MacOS X Server which is based on BSD. Just a thought.
--
InstantCool
So far Mac snobs would always say ... my G4 is faster than your Pentium 3 (for some definitions of fast) - and my OS doesn't crash as much as yours ... and ... and ...
...) ...
... {GRiN}
If (as this is only a rumour) Apple is finally porting their OS onto different architectures, this would significantly change their market positioning - so far, it's been Apple Computers - Apple Macintosh [insert flavour here] + MacOS (IBM have their own PPC's, remember?).
Porting to other platforms would give Apple a chance to look at actually selling their "superior" (as my MacSnob Friend[tM] would say) OS to us poor people that have to put up with only that "other" OS to run on our (inferior? bah!) x86 architectures (and alpha, and crusoe and
Or, you could just not bother and run Linux like a lot of us do now
.my 2p
While it's great to see more competition in Apple's processor market, one has to question their true motivations. That is, are there real concerns with the future outcome of project V'Ger, or do they feel they have to jump onto the incredibly hyped bandwagon that is Transmeta? These days, I feel that Apple is less of a computer company, and more of a clothing brand.
It comes with the moderation points. Selected moderators get the following welcome message:
Greetings! You have moderator access and 5 points. You also have 5 rocks which you may choose to smoke at any time. Please review the moderator guidelines as well as the Crack Guidelines before you go smoking that 8-ball.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
Also, I believe Apple has the skill to make a very good athlon board. And, with the use of things such as firewire, Apple could really turn things around quick in the market. We'd have an x86 processor system with all the goodies that are normally reserved to motorolla processored systems. (theoretically) Probably would even be able to get the athlon up to the PC200 that it's capable of, I'd hope.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Now I should preface this by saying that MacOS Rumors is not a very reliable source, but this rumor just make sense.
Back in 1997, Apple introduced G3 machines. The initial machines ran at 233 and 266 MHz. Now back then, Pentium IIs were also up to 266MHz, and Mac fanatics had a valid claim in saying that the G3 beat the PII.
However, a lot has changed since then. Or rather, it hasn't. That's the problem. G3s are now up to 500MHz(but only in the form of an upgrade, not from Apple), and G4s are maxing out at 450MHz.
But Intel an AMD have been pushing the x86 farther than anyone imagined. And Apple?
Well it's probably not really Apple's fault, but Motorola and IBM have really dropped the ball with the G4. In fact, an article that recently appeared in AppleInsider reports conditions to be far worse than anyone imagined. If things truly are that bad, Apple is smart to move.
In addition, doing the port should be far easier than it would have been with the old MacOS(Apple tried this once, it was called Star Trek IIRC). In fact, in it's earlier developer releases, there was an Intel version of Rhapsody(now called MacOS X Server, and really the predecessor to OS X). But that version was Steved(pissing off some developers and users).
So, if Apple is in fact doing this, it is a very smart move. MacOS X looks great, but no one but the most fervent Mac addicts would buy a 500MHz G4 8 months from now.
But there could be problems, the main one being that Apple would be forced to compete with other PC manufacturers, who, regardless of what Apple says, have far better price/performance ratios than Apple. I'm a Mac user, and I know if I could run the MacOS on it, my next machine would not be a G4.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple makes most of it's money off of hardware sales, and though they are trying to diversify(Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, the upcoming AppleWorks 6, etc.), their revenue from hardware is about 95% of the total IIRC.
Of course, opening up the kick-ass MacOS interface to all PC users could mean enormous hardware sales, but that is speculation.
I guess in conclusion, Mac users would love this, Apple stock holders probably wouldn't.
Ignoring the technical issues of whether this would be possible, I would love to see it on my PC. I want to buy some kind of mac machine, but I've spent too much on my Windows PC over the past year to justify, and heck what would I need another PC for anyway? Bring it on!
Does anyone seriously argue that MacOS is more stable than Windows9x much less NT?
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
Hi all,
I have long been wondering about this, and I may have missed its explanation on the Transmeta website, everyone here is talking about Crusoe and its x86 emulation, as well as the possiblity of emulating other architectures. This is all fine and dandy, but I have another question:
What about the filesystems? Even if the Crusoe could emulate all x86 instructions, it will still be prevented from running more than one type of filesystem. Unless the code morphing includes translations from all types of filesystems to one generic filesystem (I would imagine this would be a _huge_ performance problem).
You'll have to excuse my question, I may just be too tired to realize the obvious answer...
The Jet
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
So, you're basing a website's content on how well it loads up? In that case, sites like slashdot.org must have pretty poor content!
That's not to say that MacOSRumors has good content, but if you're going to judge a site's content, READ THE CONTENT, don't make lame assumptions about the writers.
Went to the web site pointed out in the opening article, and this is what I got:
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (61) in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 3
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 4
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 38
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL result index in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 39
Fatal error: Call to unsupported or undefined function error() in PHP/adfunc.php3 on line 40
Seems to me we've got a bunch of clueless rookies running the site, which makes any information they have to spill extremely suspect.
Uh, it's a trite comment by Automatic. Is there anyone out there that still cares? Is there still a group of Automatic junkies that truly believe then when a scarcity-of-intelligence is combined with a paucity-of-self-esteem, and then divided by a teenage-rebellion-against-large-institutions-that- individually-wrap-cheese, the whole thing equals niche coolness? I think novelty is the highest aspiration for that equation. But hey, if it hadn't been for the Evil Britny Spears ...
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Gee, you give a line of credit to somebody with no income. Think you'll come out ahead? Apparently so.
When was the last time you had homemade bread fresh from the oven?
I have serious doubts that Apple will ever port it's OS to anything other than Apple hardware. It seems to me that this is a thinly disguised threat aimed at Motorola. Motorola is taking way too long (in Apple's opinion) to get the G4s up to full speed, so Apple is threatening to move it's systems to another platform. In a few months, Motorola will have the bugs worked out of the G4s, and Apple will forget all about porting Darwin to Crusoe, x86, sparc, or whatever else they're supposedly "considering".
0 1 - just my two bits
Did anyone notice that "Transmeta Crusoe" anagrams to "A consumer's treat"? Pretty cool :)
Anyway it'd be nice to see Darwin on other architectures. Choice is Power.
God Fucking Damnit
Apple is exploring porting Darwin to other processors (including Transmeta's Crusoe processor) due to frustration with availability of high speed Motorola G4 processors.
This blurb doesn't sound quite right -- the Crusoe in it's current incarnation isn't (and isn't meant to be) a high-Mhz monster. If Apple is exploring porting Darwin to Crusoe, it's most likely due to interest in portable and appliance-type devices which can take advantage of Crusoe's low power consumption, and not due to a speed advantage over the G4.
I'm sure that Apple isn't happy with Motorola's progress with the G4. The G4 is a pretty powerful processor, but it's losing the Mhz-marketing battle. Which brings up the question, what chips have high clockspeeds which could be replacements for the G4? Alphas? Athlons? Intel's upcoming Willamette and Foster chips?
This is pretty cool news, seeing how Darwin has not found it's way onto Intel yet (as far as I've seen). OpenStep/Mach (from which Mac OS X/Darwin derive) has gone through a lot of change, especially on the lower level (what is now Darwin) to be come what it is. This'll be interesting to see! People have X running on Darwin on their PPC systems, and have more or less, a usable system. I just cannot wait to the day when I can buy a G4 to run Mac OS X. I think it's worthy to be the heir of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, the best OS ever produced, as far as I see.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Back in the days of 486s and 68k Macs, rumor has it that Apple did get a working MacOS that ran on x86 in order to "encourage" Motorola to make faster chips.
I might be able to see FrieWire (though it's getting some more attention). But if you think SCSI is dead, that is an insane statement. And Motorola 680x0 chips are hardly obsucre, and can even still be seen in many embedded applications. Being adopted by Apple is not necessarily a kiss of death, just sometimes :)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
About 3 years ago, when I was still working at an Appre reseller, as a tech guy, I got a very vivid example of exactly how smoothly inegrated all the components of the Mac are.
A customer had a PowerMac 8000 series system, that they wanted to run the chinese language add-on, under OS8. They couldn't get it to work, so they brought it to us. Bear in mind, that this is an Apple provided OS, and an Apple provided application for that OS.
When they brought the machine in, it wasn't even booting anymore. So I dumped the HDD, and reloaded the OS clean from CD. Brand new install. Then I popped in the Chinese language pack, and loaded that. One reboot later, I had a machine that no longer would boot. It would restart, and drop a error on the screen, hanging completely.
No other software installed on the system. Just 2 "well integrated" pieces of dreck from Apple.
Ever since then, I've taken it with a grain of salt, that having one company control the hardware architecture, and the software that it runs so completely, is any better than the chaos in the PC market. Bad coding, and compatibility issues are everywhere. And Apple's not much better than any other big software house.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Darwin is NEXTSTEP. It already runs on 68x00, HPPA, SPARC, i386 and PPC. Having Darwin/x86 is easy. Having OO frameworks on top of this is easy too. Having Cocoa apps on it is also easy.
But:
1/ Apple commited to Rhapsody/Intel, and never delivered it (beside the Developer Previews)
2/ Running on i386 would cut in their hardware sales.
3/ Apple have no choice but to deliver a 'compatibility box'. Darwin/x86 don't run legacy (68x00/ppc) mac apps.
Hence the rumor is crap.
Cheers,
--fred
Sorry, I suck at HTML, here's the article:
r t1.shtml
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/0002/g4-pa
Yes. The mac is slowly moving away from it's ROMs.
Apple's unified motherboard architecture (inside ibooks, imacs, g3s, g4s) doesn't have hardware ROMs. Just OpenFirmware pointing to a boot file.
MacOS X is kinda guaranteed to not need a hardware ROM, if Apple wants it to run on any macs released in the past few years.
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
AFAIK, Darwin is liscensed under Apple's "Public Source" agreement. Now, I'm not nearly as current on MacOS X architecture as I would like, but doesn't all of MacOS X sit on top of Darwin?
Couln't one simply port Darwin to other platforms, and them move all of OS X? Apple wouldn't even need to do it, we could!
I don't dispute what you're saying here (being a long time reader of MOSR), but keep in mind it is a RUMORS site! The whole purpose of MOSR is to feed news and speculation to people interested in the Mac platform. Sure, they've been wrong on a lot of things, but they've also hit the nail on the head sometimes. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the time they were "wrong" were times when products never made it to actual release.
You the man.
This is great for Apple and for open sourcers everywhere, but let's keep track of the fact that Darwin is not OSX. Darwin is the foundation for OSX, but it lacks things like the Quartz imaging layer, Carbon and the Blue Box to run good old-fashioned Mac apps, and, of coourse, the notorious Aqua interface. Darwin has always been cross-platform (PPC and x86), it's only higher-level services that are platform-specific.
It's great that Apple is porting the code to other platforms. It will provide some basic level of interoperability and perhaps make it easier to port software (say, Adobe Photoshop) to other Darwin-based OSes. Note that I said easier, not easy. It'd probably still be a lot more fun to port SuSE apps to LinuxPPC.
What porting Darwin really does is make a good, basic POSIX-compliant BSD-like OS available for many major platforms. At the very least, it may provide some interesting ideas. But it sure don't mean that I can go out and buy some Crusoe-based laptop and run Mac OS X on it.
They are both pretty shoddy, but people have different expiriences with both systems.
This is simply because they were not designed to be extended in this way. They are both built upon ugly extentions to make them support modern features.
If anyone disagrees that they are not crap, then I would ask you why both Apple and Microsoft are switching away from their current kernels. Apple is moving to MacOS X while Microsoft is going to migrate people to NT.
The main problem is the systems were not very well engineered. MacOS was origianly good for getting a GUI to boot off a floppy while Windows was a GUI shell on top of DOS. I would bet that the original programmers never planned on having either of these systems do as much as they have been stretched to run today.
So I say they both need to be dumped.
-- "Well, Hello, Mr. Fancy-pants. I've got news for you pal, you ain't in control but two things right now, Jack and s
MOSR just stole some users' (myself included) comments and queries off of the appleinsider message board, it is a purely hypothetical discussion reacting to a rumor (which in itself is probably untrue) that there will be no G4 speed bumps until August. It's just another case of that guy spouting off nonsense.
check it out at http://forum.appleinsider.com
it's under "future hardware"
For a few years they've used IDE (which is why iMacs aren't $5000), the expensive boxes do drive slavery (never had to mess with the innards of a cheap one, so I don't know about those), and internal SCSI has been pretty much dropped in favor of FireWire connections (at least on the G4s I've been looking at, which obviously ain't all of them).
+1 Informative, -1 Offtopic.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
While Crusoe could theoretically emulate non-x86 instruction sets, the underlying architecture is designed to optimize for x86 instructions. So it's non-optimal for other instruction sets (especially RISC, as has been pointed out). This is why it's not as revolutionary as it claims to be. They've made a faster x86 which can be software upgraded to new x86 instruction sets. A truly revolutionary design would have been instruction set neutral (well, within CISC or RISC domains, to be reasonable). The other thing that undermines Crusoe's revolutionary power is that Transmeta patented the technology and won't publish the underlying crusoe instruction set. So you won't be seeing instruction set neutral chips and you won't be seeing Open Source implementations of different instruction sets for Crusoe. What would be truly revolutionary would be a single chip that could emulate all the instruction sets I have programs for. In my case these are all CISC, so it would be doable. I could eschew my emulation software in favor of emulation in the chip.
Translation: "I got scared during the dark days when Apple was 'beleagered,' so I ran and hid my head in the sand."
I just read this morning how they chose not to give or even sell (at street price) iMacs to freeiMac. The company FreeiMac would give away free iMac computers with the usual 3 years of Earthlink subscription plus accepting advertising.
Translation: "I read somewhere that Apple didn't want to supply tech support to thousands of users too dumb to know that there's no such thing as a free computer, and anyway, Apple already has an Earthlink deal going."
Talk about clueless! They have turned down another opportunity to increase the awareness and use of their computers. They already have an ever decreasing share of the market and decisions like this will only help seal their doom.
Translation: "What is this iMac thing everyone is talking about? Why have I never heard of it? I'm sure glad I sold all my Apple stock when they reached that high of 18."
Jobs is an insane, megalomanial leader of a corporation led by more fools. Not that Apple doesn't do good things -- the Macintosh is an incredible computer and I loved mine. But I bowed to economics and bought a less expensive PC (I prefer Linux or BeOS, thank you).
Translation: I've heard that Steve Jobs runs a tight ship, and forces his employees to work towards a common goal, and to be productive. It must suck to work where you have to earn your paycheck. Since I don't have a paycheck to worry about, I couldn't afford anything but this leftover PII doorstop, and whatever free OS I could find to run on it."
This possible move to the Crusoe processor may be the sign of intelligence: Emulating the G4 in a cheaper and less power-hungry processor == Less expensive G4 == Cheaper Macs == More consumers buying your expensive hardware.
Translation: "I don't know much about the G4, but I assume it uses electricity just as inefficiently as a Pentium. I wonder if I can get a free Crusoe. Too bad I flunked economics."
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Is there any slashdot-story without a comment like this? Probably not.
Doesn't matter, I think it's funny.
Didn't Crusoe get cast away in the south seas and didn't Darwin write The Origin of the Species after a south seas trip?
Am I missing something? that trip to the moon took longer than expected.
But it is interesting are the rumours sugesting Apple will create a Crusoe optimised x86 OS or native crusoe code?
But don't forget kids these are just rumours, remember <snip>...loads of crap...rumours of...etc etc etc </snip>
Sparkes
*** www.linuxuk.co.uk relaunches 1 Mar 2000 ***
blog and junk
I don't know if the porting story is true, but Mac OS Rumors has a spotty record. Many of its leads often seem to be lifted from elsewhere, the rumor reliability is poor, and usually so late as to be useless, besides which its articles are so filled with bogus predictions using words such as "likely", "possibly", "predicted", and longs chains of if-then scenarios as to completely obliterate any authoritative source that might have passed a true lead on in the first place.
You will be issued one grain of salt apiece.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect