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Darwin Booting On x86
bjtuna writes "According to this article at the Daily Daemon News, Apple's Darwin is booting on both Intel chips AND Connectix VirtualPC under MacOS." The screenshots are available as is the original link.
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All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
"The big stumbler for x86 OSX is Apple's greed -- they don't want to lose the margins on their hardware."
Stupid, lousy companies, trying to maximize profits in legitimate ways. If their stock price continues to increase, I'm going to sell. I don't want all this money.
:)
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
originally i typed "mario kart" but then i realized, that doesn't work very well except in zsnes :)
Don't forget that they might also be able to switch to SPARC and whatever chips HP was using in their stations. OpenStep ran fine on no less than 4 platforms (which, for a commercial OS, was a great feat a few years ago).
NeXT/OpenStep/OS X (whatever) has always been well-designed enough that it was portable.
And don't forget Apple made a fairly flawless leap across architectures from 68k to PPC.
In short: the OS can jump Hardware. No mistake about that.
But the likelihood that PPC is going to die seems slim. Even supposing demand went down for them in personal computers, their demand in the embedded and communications market is fairly high.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Darwin is the core of MacOS X.
This is why this is such a big deal. The fact that it runs on VirtualPC without modifying that software application (unlike, say, Windows Me) means that a vast majority of x86 processors out there today can run Darwin. And if they can run Darwin, the core of MacOS X, they're much much closer to being able to run MacOS X itself.
So be happy. The open source community has just scored another coup. :-)
not that I know what I'm doing, but: $ cvs -d ':pserver:user@anoncvs.publicsource.apple.com:/cvs /Darwin' login results in a password prompt. empty string and "user" don't work. Thanks anyways.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Well, if you compare PowerMacs with the new legacy-free PC's, you find that they're almost exactly identical, except for the processor. Compaq, Dell, and IBM have machines that have USB ports, FireWire ports, PC100 RAM, AGP video, ATA hard disks, DVD-ROM drives, and no old-style parallel and serial ports, no PCI slots ... and so does Apple.
If Darwin PPC already knows how to talk to USB and FireWire devices, isn't it just a matter of porting that stuff to Darwin x86? They're the same USB and FireWire devices being used on both platforms.
Right now Apple's cash cow is their hardware. And until the majority of apps are re-written to be native OS X code (a.k.a. Cocoa), as opposed to "optimized MacOS Classic code" (a.k.a. Carbon), you won't see any public push from Apple to get OS X running on Intel
I think you're wrong there (not about hardware being their cash cow). It is because they are dependent on the hardware, that they need to move away from Motorola/IBM. Right now Apple is getting $3K for 500 Mhz machines, what could they get for GHz or dual Ghz if they could use P3s or Athlons?
Which is why it would be a better example than Super Mario World. Having a program run on a particularly picky platform can be an indication that it is likely to work on ones that are less so. (And having a particularly picky program run on a platform can be an indication that less picky ones will work)
Interesting thoughts, but a hard answer for BSD's difficulties requires further investigation. One could make a career out of the whole study of industrial design failures. In some cases, such as that of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, the causes are self-evident (in retrospect, anyway). In other cases, such as the problems with BSD unix, the reasons for failure are more subtle and require some digging. On the one hand, BSD had the problem with copyright violations which led to a lawsuit. But would a lawsuit be sufficient to permanently cripple the whole BSD project?
Perhaps the closest analogy in terms of industrial failures is that of the Ford Edsel. Touted as the "car of the future", the Edsel was an unqualified flop. Yet, there wasn't anything really all that terrible about the Edsel. For whatever reasons, the public roundly rejected it. The same could be said about BSD unix. There isn't anything terribly wrong with it, but it has been pretty much rejected by the IT industry at large. Did the legal problems play a hand? Most definitely. But that doesn't explain it all.
There is no easy way to assign "x's" and "o's" to a dilemma of this sort. In the end, you might have to call it "bad luck". The public bases its choices on mysterious reasons that are beyond even the best marketing hype. Why was the public enamored with the hula hoop? Why are scooters now the latest craze? Those with the answers aren't saying. For every success, there are dozens of unheard of failures which have disappeared into obscurity. Anyone remember "Hacky Sack"? I thought so.
umm, the CEO of Be Inc has already said that they will NOT open source the kernel. This was right after they open sourced the tracker and deskbar. All the beos guys talk about how their getting their networking rewrite and opengl. THAT IS SOMETHING TO BRAG ABOUT? Its the year 2000 and your bragging about getting networking and opengl? Give me a freakin BREAK!!! BeOS is a great OS, but it has a company who is more interested in BeIA and it is closed source so the users really have ABSOLUTELY no control over where it is going. Some might say that the company will take the OS where the users want it to go. This is wrong, because I know that the vast majority of BeOS users wanted the company to stick with regular computer systems rather then internet appliances. Be is just like other companies. They go where the money is and could careless about what their customers want.
I will continue saying this until people remember it!!!!
As for the "chancesof OS/X on X86," Mac OS/X was originally based on NeXT/OpenSTEP and called Rhapsody. Apple made alpha releases of Rhapsody for x86 and PPC both. The kernel used to run on X86 just fine until Apple scrapped X86 development for Rhapsody and focused entirely on the PPC platform. Then they moved to the current Darwin kernel and a litte more of the X86 code went missing.
~GoRK
You know, that game has made many PC using friends of mine wish they had a spare Mac to play it on...
now let's see a massively multiplayer version... ooh.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Man, I know you love BeOS, but you're embarrassing yourself. BeOS and Mac OS X are not even in the same league. I used BeOS for a while and I really liked it compared to Windows, but the things that are missing become quickly apparent to most people. If it satisfies your needs, then great. I would like to see BeOS go on forever. I like the company and I like the community. I like Scot Hacker. There are even two or three good songs about BeOS. BeOS users are mostly happy and Windows users mostly aren't, and that says something.
... alright.
However, there are only about 100,000 BeOS users, according to Be. Apple ships 100,000 Macs every couple of weeks, in a slow quarter. How can Be really compete with Apple in this case? Many people would tell you "open source", but Mac OS X is even more open source than BeOS. Darwin is running on x86 as of today, thanks to that.
As far as technology, once you get past the file system, and the fact that you can build your own BeOS box out of carefully-selected generic PC hardware, then you run out of reasons to recommend BeOS over Mac OS X. Mac OS X supports more tech "buzzwords" than BeOS (things like Java2 and WebDAV), is more open source, runs more apps (even without Classic), and will have more users sometime around the middle of next week. Mac OS X is already being preinstalled by Apple as an option on G4 machines, and BeOS hasn't shipped preinstalled for years.
Be made a lot of noise a few years ago because both Windows and Mac OS were stuck in ruts. R4 looked pretty good in many ways against Windows 98 and even NT 4, which lacked an astonishing number of things itself. The whole Copland/Gershwin/Rhapsody thing almost took Apple out of the picture entirely. Be seemed to be the only one with any forward momentum at that point in the race for a "modern OS". Since then, though, Linux, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X have each become impressive realities, and BeOS hasn't changed all that much, except to become BeIA.
> Do the benchmark, and publish the result.
Benchmark what? Digital video editing? Pro-level Web design? Browsing the Web with JavaScript, HTML 4.0, CSS 1.0, Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime? Serving Web pages over TCP/IP? Rendering with OpenGL? Running Java 2 apps? Porting software from Mac OS Classic, BSD, OpenStep? These are the things Apple is designing Mac OS X to do quickly and easily, but you just plain can't do these things with BeOS. Maybe you just want to see a comparison of how fast you can copy 1000 files from one volume to another? Well
Once again, good luck with BeOS. What it does, it does well, and it makes people happy and productive. Why pretend that it's something that it's not, though? That just works against it in the long run.
VPC 2 can be considered to be a different "machine" than VPC 3, as far as I know. Virtual PC 3.0 is only $40 or something (with IBM PC DOS included), so it's worth upgrading. VPC 3 uses the Mac networking (instead of having only the PC or only the Mac connected to the Internet), supports USB, AppleScript, runs Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 6, and is faster, too.
... needs to be ported to Mac OS X, though, because it won't run in the Classic environment (quite deliberately, apparently ... Connectix need to make whole different optimizations).
Man, it's fun to play with
> If Compaq would push Alphas (which DEC didn't
> really, and they got bought) every other processor
> could die. (x86 which should, G4, ia64, sparc(64))
Except for the fact that an Alpha needs something like 70 watts and gives off a correspondingly high amount of heat. The G4 500 needs only about 11 watts, and the G3 needs only 5 or 6. PIII mobile chips are as little as 15 watts. This is not important for servers, but for fanless desktops, and mobiles, it's very important. Apple makes fanless desktops and mobiles (except the one fan in their tower machine that is primarily there for the four or five hard disks you can put in there), so Alpha's are not suitable for them at all.
Lots of people love the Alpha and think that it's only marketing that's kept it from the mainstream, but there are technical reasons as well.
Right now Apple's cash cow is their hardware. And until the majority of apps are re-written to be native OS X code (a.k.a. Cocoa), as opposed to "optimized MacOS Classic code" (a.k.a. Carbon), you won't see any public push from Apple to get OS X running on Intel. I'll bet they're working on it, but way, way, way behind the scenes, in case Motorola can't deliver the faster G4s like they said they could. (IBM can do it, but the G4 is Mot's baby, and they're the ones saying "no".)
If Apple would release OS X for X86 before the apps are fully ramped up and Apple has licensing in place with PC vendors, it would be a disaster. The bottom would fall out of Apple's hardware sales, the apps wouldn't be there to make the masses switch platforms (especially corporate clients), and Apple would last about 6 months.
I say they'll keep churning along like they're doing now with PPC hardware, wait a couple years until all the major apps are OS X native, then strike up an OS X for x86 licensing deal with clone manufacturers. Assuming the current clock speed hurdles for the PPC chip are overcome, Apple will retain the "high end" with the PPC, and let clone manufacturers churn out the low-end. Why? Apple will always want to "make the whole widget". And I for one think they should.
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MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
Really? Can you get full unrestricted access to the complete code base of MacOSX? What license is it under? you don't have to do one of those cheesy as "web form registor for free" crap do you?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Yes, it does. In fact, the reports of Darwin running on Intel mention using LILO to load it.
The OS X you saw, or probably read about, was PRE-BETA. Are you kidding me? You are judging Alpha software for speed? I read that the beta is nuch faster than DP4 and I ran DP4 and the speed was fine. The reason why Apple is push dual-processor Macs to get a 1GHz machine out there. But regardless a 500MHz G4 runs as fast as a 700-800MHz PIII.
Of course I was running Rhapsody Alpha 1 for X86 almost three years ago before Apple discontinued the project. Even had the little apple menu and 3-pane finder on my Pentium there.
Seeing as Darwin is based on NeXT/OpenSTEP which was used on *BOTH PPC AND X86* there really wasnt a lot of legwork involved in making Darwin work on X86 (especially since apple did it three years ago anyway)... i would have guessed that a bunch of macheads would do it though -- even though there's really nothing special about the Darwin kernel compared to any other variety of BSD that runs on X86.
~GoRK
"...almost [as] spread as linux..." ???
Don't you mean NetBSD?
NetBSD is running on around 30 different platforms, while FreeBSD is running on i386 & Alpha.
"Be is just like other companies. They go where the money is and could careless about what their customers want. "
Humm did you think about this before you wrote it?
The customers are the ones with the money. BeOS is not selling very well. If they were to open up Be it might work in there favor, there is not much they can loose.
Will
The BSD subsystem is in the same address space as Mach, but all of Mach's interfaces are preserved. This is much faster than a user-level BSD subsystem, and it does not sacrifice the modularity of Mach's native interfaces.
More information is available here.
Give me a break, gents. Every sane human alive knows that all the incompatible versions of BSD unix are dead. Look at Usenet. How many BSD posts are there? You do the math. FreeBSD has about 80 or 90 posts per day. NetBSD has about 1 or 2 posts per day. OpenBSD has about 15 or 20 posts per day. BSDi had about 1 or 2 posts per day. Look at the competition (for any reasonable definition of "competition"). Those other guys are getting 30 or 40 times the interest. NetBSD has about the same level of interest as Xinu (ever heard of that?).
BeOS is far far quicker. I'm sorry that Mac OS is so poor in terms of performance. Because of the many levels of complexity, it is hard to say who is at fault. I can understand crashes in an alpha release. But crashes in beta/production software? Un-thinkable. I know that some people do not look with favor upon the FSF, but at least there coding guidelines say it all: "zero tolerance for crashes"
The main difference between successful operating systems and *BSD can be explained in terms of licenses. For example, most important Unix vendors are choosing the GPL license: SGI, SCO, HP-UX, LINUX, AIX, DEBIAN, REDHAT, etc.
Where does that leave *BSD? Good question. *BSD is the now the outside guy looking in. They assumed that the parade would follow them. But then they turned around. The parade had veered off to another course and the ring leaders were left twirling their batons to an empty crowd. Can *BSD recover? Smart money says no.
Why bother with Star Office? Its almost as bloated and slow as MS Office. I've been using Gobe Productive for the last while and its been great. Reads/Writes Word and Excel documents as well.
Be, Inc. has also not been spending all their resources on BeIA. They are actively developing BONE (BeOS Networking Environment) which is a complete rewrite of the Networking stack. Early benchmarks indicate, IIRC, about 2000% speed increase over the current stack. Seeing that it has been under development for a bit, we are anticipating a release somewhat soon.
They are also completely rewriting the hardware OpenGL implementation, an early look at it indicates that it completely wipes the floor with both Windows and Linux.
-Gandalf Greyhame
P.S. Kuro5hin is coming back soon! Yay!!!!
Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
rob malda has barely made any effort to fully describe the process of selecting slashdot moderators. what little information that has been supplied is an outright lie. the story of malda's moderation system is far more insidious than merely separating wheat from chaff.
last night, as i leaned over to give my natalie portman poster a tender kiss goodnight, i was psychically cast into a hypnotic trance. while entranced, my spirit guides delivered unto me the tale of the slashdot moderators. prepare to have your faith in mr. malda and moderation shaken to the core.
not long ago, rob malda was an outcast teenager. he did well in some of his classes, but was terrible with english. as is so often the tragic case today, his teachers passed him anyway, just to get rid of him. since malda had no real life, he spent much of his time on the computer (of course), and watching the public-access cable channel. it was there that malda heard of the mysterious mongolian monks.
malda was watching his favorite talk show, "elizabeth claire prophet." the guests that night were a group of monks based in mongolia. the monks described how they had been travelling to china to trade some of their cute teen daughters for natalie portman memorabilia. the monks had travelled no more than three days when they noticed a brilliant light in the daytime sky. the light grew larger. and larger. and larger. soon the sky was completely hidden, from horizon to horizon, by a giant metallic disk.
the monks were taken aboard the craft and placed under some sort of alien mind-control. there, they were given the deepest possible insights into the nature of man, the universe and god. a week later, the alien beings returned the monks to the earth and vanished forever.
the monks considered the area holy ground and constructed a new temple there, not bothering to return to their old monastery. they took their daughters as wives and began their own commune of worship, based on the teachings of the aliens. the monks practiced meditations which unleashed powerful spiritual forces within them. as the wives bore children, the community grew.
malda was intrigued by the spiritual insights received by the monks and excited by the idea of incestuous pleasures. unfortunately, the monks had no internet connection and so malda could not email them. without hesitation, malda booked a flight and left for mongolia. the plane ride was long and tiring, but his curiosity kept him driven.
after a month of searching, malda finally located the commune. initially, he, kept a safe distance, for fear of rejection. he studied the monks from afar. malda had heard stories of the monks' bizarre meditations, which gave them extaordinary powers. malda was somewhat skeptical of these stories at first, until he saw the truth first-hand.
in the week that malda studied the monks, he witnessed the breaking of every natural law. he was astonished as he watched the monks levitate, create pockets of lush weather within the commune and communicated with spirit forces. malda grew more and more excited and he devised a plan for meeting them.
malda knew the monks would respect him if he could display his own "magical" powers. he was determined to win their confidence, and he had with him all of the necessary tools. he approached the commune confidently. the monks greeted him with skepticism at the gate. malda took a deep breath and began his show.
using an aibo, a can of jolt cola and an inflatable sex doll, malda shocked the monks with his display of magical powers. the monks accepted him into the commune. malda's head was shaved and he was given a robe and a room. the monks warned malda to stay away from their daughters-wives.
the monks methodically taught malda the word of the great messengers. he learned eagerly at first, but soon grew bored with his life in the commune. malda's life was further stressed when his blow-up doll suffered a puncture-wound and became useless. a few days later, his aibo's power dried up. with no pet and no woman, malda slowly grew crazed.
malda had hit rock-bottom. his penis chafed from dry-hand masturbation and the cold, dry climate. one dark night, he snuck into the kitchen and convinced one of the daughter-wives to join him in his room. malda was quite relieved that he would finally get some female tenderness... for the first time in his life. he was so excited, he almost closed the deal prematurely.
unluckily for malda, the daughter-wife's father-husband was expecting her in bed at that particular moment. the women were expected to be with the monks at a very specific time for retirement. the monk went on a violent rampage throughout the temple, ending with malda's room. he flung open the door to behold his daughter-wife half disrobed and laying on top of malda. malda looked up at the monk and gasped. the daughter-wife giggled.
the monk unsheathed his sword and the daughter-wife was beheaded on the spot. malda kicked the unviable head away from him and jumped out of the bed. he backed himself into a corner, terrified. the monk approached him the with sword raised. just as he reached striking distance he dropped the sword and collapsed, crying for the loss of his daughter and the betrayal of his adopted son. malda was dishonorably discharged from the commune.
malda wandered into the forest and took shelter in a cave. he spent the next five days curled up in a fetal position, feeding on bat guano and insects. the bitterness and hatred consumed malda. once again, he was an outsider. he decided that this time, he would not be trampled on.
malda wandered for three days until he came upon a small village. he entered the shop of the local blacksmith and killed the iron-worker by bashing him in the head with the aibo. malda crafted himself a massive machete. he took apart the aibo and used its quality sony components to enhance the machete with a nuclear driven flaming mechanism.
malda returned to the commune. he took one last look at the peaceful community, then hit the ignition switch on his machete. the weapon screamed like a thousand tortured souls as it ignited with flame. malda then inserted the rechargeable battery from the aibo into his rectum. malda stormed the compound, beheading all of the monks and devouring their brains, thus capturing their souls into the battery in his anus.
the sky turned the color of blood and a great storm of pestilence swept over the village. malda barely escaped before the commune was decimated by the hand of god, thus purging the terrible evil that had been committed. his face stained with blood and his heart stained with the forces of evil, malda returned to the united states.
malda was crazed with power. he devised another insidious plan. he would build an army of mindless followers, which he would use to bring the world to its knees. he would use an online site for the tech-savvy elite to build this army. but he needed a way to control the chaotic masses that would come flocking to his new site. he needed his generals.
malda prowled the streets of his hometown, enticing male prostitutes with promises of cheap crack cocaine and sexual favors. once the prostitutes agreed to join malda in his basement, he would tie them up and place the aibo battery, upside down, in their rectum. he would then abuse the hapless victim with words of derision and samples of his writing.
the abuse was so severe, that the spirit of the victim would be broken and the soul of one monk would be absorbed from the battery. the resultant creature was not a man, nor a zombie. it was some pathetic monstrosity. the beaten souls of the monks were enslaved to malda's terrible evil. they depended upon his evil powers for sustenance. malda labelled his terrible, elite gaurd the "moderators."
malda's site grew quickly in popularity and the moderators enforced blandness and conformance with a heavy hand. no good army has room for an individual. the moderators are psychically connected to malda and know his word. that word is enforced on slashdot. the subtle moderations effectively warped the minds of those who visited the site and grew addicted, due to the powerful evil force exuded by its words.
today, malda sits in his office, strumming his electric guitar, waiting for his army of darkness to ripen.
thank you.
I thought I'd never see something so amazing as this.
Good forward thinking for Apple, thinking at least two years from now
Sig protection fault, restart to display sig
/.'s 10 Millionth
It's an x86 emulator. Darwin for x86 is an x86 program. Of course it works! If it _didn't_, THEN this would be interesting news.
This is like saying, "Super Mario World worked when CmdrTaco tried it on SNES9x for Linux!"
Of course it worked!
Now, it would be interesting if there were followups as to the chances of OSX for x86, etc, etc. But, why would there be? And even if there was, why would any of you Linux junkies want to go out and pay for it? Apple has always made the cash by selling the hardware too.
That's enough outta me.
Does the information concerning Darwin for x86 remind anyone else of BeOS? Too bad Sun Office has not been ported to BeOS and Be has concentrated all their resources on BeIA, it seemed for awhile there (about 1 1/2 years ago?) BeOS had a chance and could have been up to speed with Linux.
I'm curious about the Be communities "feelings" about Darwin.
I'm the Man! You're not!
"Most of the Darwin code is platform independent, and some of the platform-specific code includes some support for Intel processor-based systems. Darwin 1.0 has been compiled (on a PowerPC-based Macintosh system) for both Intel and PowerPC platforms, but the Intel support is very rudimentary. (For example, there's no installer, and it works only on one specific configuration.) We are working with the Darwin community to make Darwin a viable operating system for the Intel platform."
It's available not "availible."
For God's sake man, buy a freakin' spell-checker...
I don't understand why Apple is doing this. They can't possibly make a competitive OS for x86 architecture, although I would very much like to see them do just that. I doubt they will get driver support from the manufacturers, and without driver support, you have a worthless OS. It doesn't matter how cool or pretty it is.
Is this just an exercise to see if they can do it? Or are they actually planning to market this?
The other questions probably regard to threaded TCP stacks, software emulation, and POSIX compliance -- but I'd rather talk about something lilo.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
The link should be: http://www.jagshouse.com/OSX.html. Notice the addition of the "s".
This is my
This is my
--An Oldie, but a Goodie!
So, how long until we can expect OSX on the x86 platform? (OSX86...)
Seriously, though, that would be a step in the right direction IMO. I'm a linux supporter myself, but saying it's the best OS out there is pretty naive. After all, stability and functionality, while critical, are not everything. Support is still a key factor, and while apps are (slowly) going to linux, Windows still has the most useful application.
Apple, however, has a nice compromise. It's still behind windows in applications, but not by as much, and it's much more stable. (Of course, I've still managed to crash G4's on occasion)
All that's kept me prom focusing more on apple products is the fact that the hardware is for the most part much more expensive, and AFAIK that's the only place you can run (modern version, anyway) MacOS.
Fingers crossed...
-Space for rent
Had they been the first to port a BSD variant to the x86 platform, I'd be really impressed. I'll admit that getting the apple only code working is a little impressive, but we've got Linux for everything from the Compaq Ipaq to massive multiprocessor alphas, so I am not terribly thrilled that one commercial company got something of theirs cross platform, for FreeBSD is almost a spread as Linux...
I'll admit that I am impressed that they even did it at all, being unlike Apple to even acknowledge processors that don't start with 68, 60, or the letter "G" exist, but this is more of a trailing development as far as I can tell rather than "leading the industry" as it is trying to sound like...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Only Darwin is available under the Apple source license. Darwin is the MacOSX kernel, so you don't get any GUI or any of the fancy stuff. :-)
Yes you need to signup on Apple's webpage to get access, but I didn't see any cheese involved.
Darwin is still in its earliest stages on x86. If you miss the early days of Linux and *BSD, you might enjoy helping get Darwin going.
If you want to try Darwin for yourself, you'll need
Once you have that hardware, you need to download two images: one for a partition of type AB (20 KB compressed) and one for a partition of type A8 (about 100 MB compressed). Create appropriately sized partitions on your disk (945 blocks and 920304 blocks respectively), and uncompress the images onto those partitions (I used primary partitions; extended partitions might work, too) and try to boot. You can either use lilo, or download a Darwin boot sector.
If you can boot Darwin, then you can begin to explore. If you like to hack on a new OS, or would like to see how Apple's idea of Mach (monolithic kernel) differs from that of the Hurd (microkernel), or even if you'd just like to see things done a different way (e.g., dyld vs. ld.so, netinfo vs. NIS, IOKit vs. ????, etc.), Darwin can be pretty interesting.
For more information on on Darwin, check out Darwinfo or Apple's darwin-devel mailing list.
As a developer of UNIX, and BSD kernels and related technology I can tell you that all betas and pre-releases of UNIX based OSes are generally slow, the current public beta i'm running on an older iMac would eat your linux alive in speed. I've done some extensive test, and would love to post the results, Apple spend several years developing directly with Berkley on there BSD version, and it combines the best of all variants of unix. It is awesome. Just ask compaq who has been begging Apple to switch to it's hardware platform.
brainchild out
Investor my ass. You're probably just some 15 year old kid or you're at best a day trader which hardly qualifies you to the mantle of "investor." BSDi is recording record profits right now and Wasabi just pulled down half a million after only ten weeks of business. Go troll somewhere else. Now go read up on some BSD history rather than creating fud little boy.
they have a password-protected cvs tree, it seems. to get the password you have to agree to their license. I have no interest in agreeing with their license, let's just say I'll only download the GPLed code they have there (agreeing with an apple license to download modified GPLed code seems antisocial, anyways). So would someone who has no interest in ever touching the code go and sign up and make an account like l/p: cypherpunks/cypherpunks, then post about it here? thanks.
but what the hell are you talking about?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
it's been doing that for quite a while, i thought (booting on x86)... and if it boots on x86, it definetly will boot on Virtual PC.
...Now we are one step closer to not having to pay a ludicrous amount of money for Apple's overpriced hardware if we just want to run OS X, and I don't think one could argue that "well, you could just use Linux or one of the BSDs."
There are many reasons that a lot of Apple's market consists of graphics professionals, and the pretty UI is one of them, and it's nice to play around with one every once in a while. I say, its about time.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Maybe they don't care? There is only one way to guarentee that you won't get ripped of. Use a closed-source license.
GPL: Freedom with provisos.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
2 x 500mhz processors is NOT 1Ghz
Multiple processors is not about running the same stuff faster, it's about running MORE at the same speed.
Dude, I just about died laughing. Have a sense of humor, and for God's sake, mod this up. Some of the FUNNIEST things humans have ever thought up in the history of the planet have been in Slashdot's troll archives. Give the troll the respect he deserves for that huge ass story. At least give him a 1.
I personally would give him a 5: Funny.
"...almost [as] spread as linux..." ???
Don't you mean NetBSD?
NetBSD is running on around 30 different platforms, while FreeBSD is running on i386 & Alpha
No kidding. "Almost as spread as Linux."
Can you say narrowminded ?
Yeah, with OS X just around the corner I have no incentive to upgrade to VPC3 at this time. I got VPC2 free when I bought this G3. I'm looking forward to running OS X on it within 6 months, and hope that Connectix has an OS X native version of VPC for me to upgrade to at that time.
Constitutionally Correct
Darwin is a BSD personality running on top of a Mach kernel.
The pretty-much-dead MkLinux project was a Linux personality running on a Mach kernel.
Would it be possible to move the MkLinux stuff over to the Darwin kernel? Seems to me that might open up many more possibilities for Darwin, as there's more software and expertise for Linux than Darwin around so far...
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
http://www5.zdnet.com/zdnn /content/mcwo/0602/mcwo0006.html
According to Morgenstern, it was actually announced by Apple in some fashion (I tried searching:
http://www.apple.com
and
http://developer.apple.com
for "trimedia", but they're not working right now)
Then, of course, AltiVec (nee VMX) hit the scene and TriMedia phaded :) into the background.
Never refuse a breath mint.
I didn't submit this one to the stories que, I figure they will check sources on my submissions from now on.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The /. article says it's booting on Intel CHIPS as well as on Virtual PC.
Folks,
:-)
The cool part is that Apple didn't do this port, community volunteers did! Lots of great work by Naoki Hamada, hacking away in Japan, and tons of other participants. This is a demonstration of the strength of the open source approach. Don't let your anti-Apple bias blur the message here.
Jason
I think this really says something about the quality that Connectix is putting out. To emulate x86 that well is pretty amazing. Throw any old x86-based OS on VPC and it just works. That's cool.
Does anyone have more information on this? It's mentioned that the disk image is for VPC3. Is it possible to get this running on VPC2? Maybe I'll have to install another copy of VPC2 (I've got one running Win95) and try this myself.
Constitutionally Correct
Had this been a Linux Sucks/BSD Rules post, guess what it would have been moderated as?
the point is that it hadn't ever booted.
even on intel. we used virtual pc to fix up the
botstrap code, and then used the images from virtualpc to make a *real* intel machine boot.
the news is, "darwin intel finally boots!", not "it works on virtal pc, too".
P.S. learn the correct spelling of ``Berkley'', Einstein. After all, you claim to be a ``developer of UNIX''. Yeah, right.
I'll assume you meant NetBSD rather than FreeBSD. Oh and btw...NetBSD currently runs on 29 different architectures. Linux is about 10 less. Go troll somewhere else little boy.
Interpretation: Speaking as a mindless zealot, I wish *BSD would just go away
BSD is arguably one of the most successful Unix, especially when considering its influence. Learn some history. Or even better, just grow up. The Linux vs BSD war is over, and everybody is winning. Even mindless zealots like you.
::sigh:: What else do you expect from an anonymous coward.
This clearly demonstrates the fault in any non-GPL license: you will get ripped off by a corporation if yo create a good enough codebase.
And how exactly did FreeBSD get ripped off? How come you GNUzis always yell when some says that "software piracy", yet turn around and accuse corporations of "stealing" free software?
It's a sorry state of affairs when those most gung-ho on free software seem to have forgotten what it's all about: sharing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yet it doesn't matter. People like choices. After having chosen Linux which illuminates quite positively many tend to be reilluminated about the powers of *BSD.
*BSD is not for everyone, and this is also one of its many forces.
I recommend you not to think strictly business like analytical as in the world of technology evolution.. what seems wrong in the present has a striking history of becoming a long time success.
Everyone already knows that Darwin works on x86. And everyone also knows that this has absolutely no impact on Apple's business plan, and does not mean that OS X will run x86. It's also irrelevant because there are several BSD-based systems which are much more worthy of x86 PC users' time.
Let's run through more facts that everyone should know. This has nothing to do with GNU/Linux or the GPL. It does not mean that Photoshop will work on FreeBSD. It doesn't mean that the Free Unix community will see an outpouring of money, code, or other support from Apple. All it means is that Apple decided to, for once, release a real operating system. They lack the talent to do so, as should be evident from MacOS 1 through 9. They found an excellent codebase, which, do to the wonderful BSD license, is essentially free (as in both pro bono and libre) for them to plunder however they wish. So they take twenty years of the best operating systems code ever written and, um, "embrace and extend" it with the GUI that Jobs brought with him from NeXT. Very "innovative". They then release this code, which allows Mac lusers run Photoshop without crashing, and allows them to get very rich with very little work.
Years of hard work and research from many real computer professionals associated with several projects across the country and around the world go to buy Mr. Jobs another few houses (hice?) and cars. Yay.
(And this, my friends, is flamebait. I love Fridays.)
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
If they can make Mac-only software run on x86 platforms, they've got a viable OS...because there's a killer app. That's right, Escape Velocity. The hordes of chronically deprived PC users will finally discover what a real game is.
It's in the BSD section, obviously, but since Darwin is the "Apple brand" of BSD the topic is Apple. Both are applicable.
Constitutionally Correct
Funny, I was just working on splicing together OPENSTEP 4.2, FreeBSD, and Darwin in hopes of getting enough of a foundation together as to see *some* of the MacOS X Beta function on Intel.
All of the source I have seen for each Darwin package has ProjectBuilder makefiles, so I assume it will build under OPENSTEP properly. If this is true, then it just *MIGHT* also build under Project Center for GNUstep..
Also, much of it is packaged as a Debian dpkg!