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Apple Secretly Maintaining x86 Port Of Mac OS X
Earlybird writes "According to this eWeek article, Apple has ported the whole of Mac OS X to the x86 architecture and is maintaining it in parallel with the PowerPC builds. Dubbed Marklar, the project is perceived as a fall-back plan, and, quoth the article, 'has apparently gained strategic relevance in recent months, as Apple's relationship with Motorola has grown strained and Apple looks to alternative chip makers.'" Believe what you will ...
I totally agree. I program GameCube games, and the PPC chip that IBM has supplied in it is just a wonderful little powerhouse. It's a modified 750 core running at 486 Mhz and has got incredible FP performance and ~ 1.6 GB/s out to memory through a special write-gather pipe. The FP can handle paired-singles (anyone see the altivec connection here?), and the machine as a whole is just stupid fast. (Yes, the memory architecture has someting to do with this too...)
Anyways, it totally makes sense for apple to go with a desktop version of the POWER4 core. The PPC specification is such that any program written that targets the UISA (think it stands for something like user instruction set architecture -- ie, non-privelidged instructions) will move right over to any other PPC core w/o a recompile. And the PPC64 spec is such that all instructions are still 32bit; it's just the data / registers that're 64bit. So binary compatibility is a no-brainer.
Couple in the fact that power4 has multiple cores on a die... and, damn. I'll buy my first Apple machine if they actually do this.
Actually, apple released an incomplete build of an early development build of OSX compiled for X86 to ADC members sometime around 4 years ago. It was dubbed as the Apple Rhaposody OS Developer Release 3. It was quite intersesting to pick up the similarities between it and OSX. A ton of information, along with screenshots are posted at this site.
It was really a transitional OS which gap between NextSTEP and OSX. It contains both elements of both OSes. Anybody recognize the chess program at the bottom of the page?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
System 7 kicked butt.
The project you're talking about is Star Trek. It happened at the same time as Taligent and Pink. Any idea where all of those things are now? Find me a Dylan programmer and we can ask him together. Or we could send him an RTF e-mail with Cyberdog. Running in Copland.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
The kernel is called xnu. The Darwin operating system (like most *BSD distributions) is comparable to what RMS and Debian call GNU-Linux. MacOSX uses a fork of Darwin-- there isn't a one to one correspondence between a Darwin release and a MacOSX release-- and adds further libraries and services, Carbon, Cocoa, and Quartz being the three most famous.
Apple employee Vince Garcia once mentioned he had OSX running on an Intel at home back in 2000, nothing new here. And remember all those stories on Macworld of the old Mac OS ports running on Intel? Heck, I'm running OS7 right now, albeit via Basilisk.
One of the authors is Nick dePlume, editor-in-chief of http://www.thinksecret.com. This site has a bit shaky reputation when it comes to rumours. The have a few hits, but most of the things they publish are blanks. In the past this site has had various rumours about OS X on x86 hardware. None of which turned out te be anything. Just because they publish and article on eweek doesn't mean it's more credible.
According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS.
This doesn't shed any light. Unless they come with a more reliable thing than 'sources' I think it's a miss.
Actually there is an Intel port. There has been for years. Way back in the Rhapsody days there were two developer releases available for Intel. Just because they stopped making them available doesn't mean they stopped building it.
The biggest reason is that maintaining an Intel version ensures that everything they write stays reasonably portable. It they can stay compatible with PPC and Intel in the code, than supporting any other chip that comes along can't be much more difficult.
Internal builds used to always be built fat...they would just be stripped to PPC-only when it came time to press to a CD for external use. I don't know if it's still the case, but I don't see why they would stop the practice.
Also, maintaining compatibility keeps future migration options open to them.
Most of OS X is highly portable already. The kernel is Mach, which was fundamentally designed with portability in mind. Above that is the BSD layer which is regularly synched with the OpenBSD source tree, which is x86 code -- so it's portable. CoreFoundation is part of Darwin, so it already compiles on x86. Cocoa is very high level and used to run on x86 back in the OpenStep days...no big issues there. I see no reason why Cocoa couln't easily go to Darwin as well. Apple had to basically build the Carbon library from scratch after the developer community refused to migrate en-masse to Cocoa. I don't believe Apple would be short-sighted enough to not write it in a portable fashion. Really, Classic is the only part of OS X that would cause a problem with an x86 port. If push comes to shove, Apple could just draw a line in the sand and say that Classic isn't supported...developers have had enough time to move their stuff forward.
Of course, just because the port is possible doesn't mean that Apple will ever make it a product. Support for such a thing would be a nightmare given the huge number of hardware options in the x86 world. Apple is barely capable of keeping up with drivers for there exremely limited set of hardware options.