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.

Comments

How to try it for yourself

[Mneme]

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

1. A recent PC (440BX motherboards seem to work; 440FX motherboards don't)
2. A video card that has a VESA 2.0 compliant BIOS (ATI Rage 128, ATI Rage Pro, and Diamond Stealth III S500 are known to work; the ATI Mach64 GX and the simulated video provided by vmware are known not to)
3. A disk with about 450 MB free (and don't try using the end of a huge disk -- that won't work)
4. A fast Internet connection
5. An Intel i82559 network card if you want 'net connectivity (e.g., Intel EtherExpress Pro/100+ Management card)

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.