Apple Builds Darwin For Intel

BluesHarp writes, "Apple's lead Darwin engineer Wilfredo Sanchez announced that he successfully built and has made available all of Darwin 1.0 for both PowerPC and Intel. Does this mean that OS X for Intel would be just a recompile away?"

From Sanchez's Avadgato diary:

Apparently a lot of people are under the impression that Apple isn't going to help out with reviving the Intel port of Darwin. This is false.

Getting everything built fat is a big step, but a lot of work remains. The next thing is to get installation bootstrapped so we can get Darwin onto an Intel system, and then to get the kernel running, since we haven't tested the new kernel on Intel yet, and there is limited driver support for Intel PC devices. I have a high degree of confidence that most of the user-space software will work without problems, particularly since a majority of it comes from the BSD world where Intel is the primary platform, but also because we've seen it work before in Rhapsody.

Neat stuff.

Comments

Re:AltiVec

[Detritus]

It isn't fair to compare clock rates. The G4 and K7 are completely different architectures. PPC chips have a much cleaner architecture as compared to the x86 chips. You need SPEC numbers to make a reasonable comparison, and even that doesn't tell you how fast your application will run. I have a program that runs great on Intel chips and runs like crap on Alpha chips. This is because the inner loop is composed mostly of logical operations on bytes, something the Alpha has trouble with.

Re:Whats next after Darwin?

[Oniros]

Actually it could be interesting. Apple might be building a "plan B" in case Motorola and IBM drop the ball with PowerPCs for the desktop.
It seems lately those guys have been more interested by the embedded market for the PowerPC line of processor than for the desktop market.
The G4 is still stalling at 500 MHz, that's more than 6 months after its introduction... meanwhile Intel and AMD are delivering over 1 GHz processors.
Maybe Apple is considering switching to x86 processors as a back-up plans if things gets really bad with the PowerPC for the desktop.

For those who think that wouldn't work because People wouldn't buy Apple boxes anymore and just run MacOS X on whatevet cheap PC hardware is available... think again:
a) nothing prevent them to adapt their OS pricing scheme to be profitable from mass OS sales
b) they will still provide the best plug & play experience since they will make sure MacOS X works smoothly with all their hardware
c) all the usual Apple stuff some of us love (Firewire, clean design, nice cases, inexpensive wireless, etc.) will probably keep the mac faithful to buy Apple hardware

Honnestly, those days, beside for the processor and motherboard, the parts are usually the same in a Mac and PC (IDE, USB, PCI, AGP, etc)... and the processor is on a daughtercard...

Janus

What's next after Darwin...

[DragonHawk]

What's next after Darwin? Maybe a school in Kansas will bans Macs?