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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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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. :-)
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
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.
---
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
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.
"...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.
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.
"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/
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.
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...
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
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".
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
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.