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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 ...
If it's not on KaZaA, it doesn't exist.
If they can't stick with Motorola, they should go with IBM.
It's one thing to go from 68k to a more powerful PPC architecture. It's another issue altogether to move from a PPC to an Intel or AMD cpu. The emulation speed would be a hell of a performance hit.
They have ported all of Mac OS X to x86? Not just the kernel?
:)
Let's pool $100,000 (Blender-style) and bribe the guy who runs their internal CVS repositories. Anyone wanna throw in a few bucks for macosx-x86-0dayl33t.iso?
qslack.com
How long 'til we get to see some leaked photos of Apple-specific X86 hardwware?
Here I'm posting an article I wrote about the Mac OS X on the PC Platform long ago and that I tried getting publish on /.. Well, maybe now is a good time to post it after all
.Net Server Beta). Eventually (the truth hurts folks), Windows will be as fast and stable as Linux, and yes, they will copy the Mac look and get away with it just as they did with Windows. And they will have a market of several hundred million users who (like a herd) will simply follow Microsoft because simply they're not tech-savvy enough to realize that there are other choices. And developers will continue increasingly target the Windows platform because numbers speak: Do I sell for 4 million Linux machines, 5 million Mac machines, or 500 million Wintel machines?
As we all know, with Linux we have the best free (as in beer) operating system in the market. It's fast, it's stable, it's well-supported, it scales, and it has a GUI environment that although very acceptable to the Linux community, it really is not up to par to the elegance and simplicity of the Mac OS/X GUI (and god spare me some flames, even the Windows XP interface feels better than the "stock" KDE or GNOME shipped with Linux).
On the other hand, we have Mac OS/X, the most amazing GUI out today for any platform. It certainly makes our friend Bill G. jelaous. It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood. However, even though it has a great backbone in the form of an open BSD system, the truth is that it is doubtfull the apple folks will get the steam, hype, and generally market support that Linux is constantly getting lately in all media, corporations, and geeks alike. Add to that the fact that Mac OS/X runs only on the PowerPC platform (at least officially), and you get a lot of potential market away from Apple.
So how about this, why not have Apple port it's whole Mac OS/X upper layers to the x86 platform, publish some specs for Linux vendors to "plug under", and run it on top of such Linux-based (as opposed BSD-based) systems???
With this we'd get the great support Linux enjoys in the enterprise (even when I'm first to recognize that BSD is just as good technical-wise, but this is a market-driven world folks), it'd also get the support from the millions of geeks who own a x86 machine, it'd get the support of all the OEMs who would almost inmmediatelly start providing hardware/software products for the platform, and just as important it would get the support of the common user thanks to its simple, elegant, and fast GUI system.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure soon after we could start converting all Wintel users to the new platform ("Mac OS/Linux"?), since a new hardware investment would not be needed. Just a software download and a much lower price than a Windows license (say, 50 bucks?).
I know, some will argue that "what makes Macs different is the tight integration of the OS with the hardware" and blah blah blah, but heck, should this that I propose take off, I'm sure that Apple will have enough leverage to publish standards making this integration much simpler and still remain open, while benefiting everyone.
Note that since the Mac OS layer would sit on top of a MacOS-compliant Linux distro, it means that teckies will NOT be forced to use the Mac OS GUI, since they could use their Linux distro as usual, minus the Mac stuff. They could even keep using their old KDE or GNOME GUIs.
So, how does Apple make money? selling the top layer (software services and GUI), and if they want even selling slick custom-built hardware boxes like they do today with the OS pre-installed.
Now, please stop all the flames about "sotfware should be free and I shouldn't have to pay to use the Mac OS/X layer on top of Linux" and all that. Software should be free, but people also have families to take care of, and Apple's effort should be rewarded by paying them. Case closed.
As for Linux, imagine all of a sudden a flood of trully useable applications being ported from the Mac (and even Wintel) world to the new "Mac OS/Linux". This would eliminate the barrier many have when trying to move from Wintel to Mac: "my apps don't work or I can't access my data".
Also imagine the simplicity of installing, deinstalling, and managing applications that Mac OS would bring (do not tell me how debian, RPMs, etc are great, they suck big time if you ever had to use them regularly; yes I have).
This, I think, it's what would really bring a true competitor to the Windows monopoly. I'm sure that *I* would switch inmediatelly.
And BTW, as an example let's take my own case: I do not use Linux regularly because it's just too darn hard to do anything (unless you _already_ knew how to do it). Sure once you get it working it's fine and dandy, but heck, sometimes to get it to work you have to get the sources, read the FAQs, HowTos, set some flags, find dependencies, get extra libraries, etc.
Likewise, I don't use Mac OS/X because I can't go out and afford to buy a whole new machine architecture. I already have my decent 1.2Ghz Celeron, it works fine, why should I switch and spend US$1,700 just to use a nice GUI?
However allow me to keep my machine, give me the stability and power of Linux, and the elegance and simplicity of the Mac, and you can count me in right away.
Now don't get me wrong, Linux is *awesome* for someone that knows how to use it, or has the time to learn it. I think's it's an amazing platform for Apache, mySQL, PHP, firewalling, routing, Java, Perl, etc, but it could be much more if it was easier to administer and use.
You gotta understand that the people in large corporations are afraid of getting into something they don't understand or think it's too complex, this is why Windows NT has gotten such a large market share; People very close to me admit it, they use WinNT even if they have to reboot it once every 2 weeks because it is *easy* to use. And folks, yes I agree that maybe "they're not qualified enough to have such a job", but the reality is that they are here to stay and always will be here to stay, and Microsoft is counting on them.
Add to all this the distressing fact that the Windows OS _is_ getting better all the time (ask a Win95/98/Me user how many times they rebooted WinXP lately, or check out the Windows
This is the time folks to trully all come together and trully create a second option to Wintel. Let's combine the best of what we have (a Linux foundation, X86 hardware, and Mac OS upper services and GUI layers), and trully create something we can be proud of a few years from now.
So what's the next step? Someone should send this article to Apple's Steve Jobs, and have Steve meet with the heads of the major Linux distros to define some specs that all would follow to support the Mac Layer. Rally some OEMs to make their products "Mac Linux"-ready (so that they could support the tight-integration features that makes Macs such a joy to use today), and rally the big software developer houses and let them know about this and get them excited, and let's all rally behind this effort and give them all the support the open source community is famous for. This could be the beginning of a trully beautiful relationship...
If they release on intel hardware it will be for a finite set of manufactures to a limited set of specs, so that they can continue to deliver true plug-and-play. Expect to pay more for intel based hardware that runs Mac OS X.
And don't be too disapointed if your current system is not supported.
-b
I hope this new marklar really works on marklar marklar. Marklar seems to be the marklar of the marklar, not just another markler off the old marklar. Marklar really does need to marklar another marklar maker in order to be marklar with the marklar. Marklar is just not marlar anymore, and this seems to be a good marklar to the marklar. A small marklar to marklar, really.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
It is much more plausible that Apple is switching the 64-bit IBM Power4 CPU. IBM is presenting this new desktop version of the CPU at Microprocessor Forum on October 15th. The CPU has a mystery vector unit with 160+ instructions, just like AltiVec. There was a post to the gcc-patches mailing list proposing a patch to enable altivec support on the powerpc64 target, and this patch originated from Alan Modra at IBM's Linux Technology Center.
All evidence indicates that IBM will produce a desktop CPU with an AltiVec unit. Apple has hit the wall with Motorola, and are now selling overclocked G4 miracle CPUs just to stay in the game. I think Apple will switch to Power4.
Right. You expect people to recompile for x86?
Do you have any idea how long it took Apple to get everyone to recompile all their software for the 68k software for the PPC? It took years. If apple had started off telling everyone to compile FAT binaries from the time that Mac OS X was released, maybe we'd be okay. But the mac os x developer community is somewhat mature now, and there is a fairly large mac os x software library. Large enough going back and getting everyone to recompile everything would be hellish.
I'm sorry, you need an emulation layer to help people crossgrade gracefully. This isn't linux. Usually, people don't have the source code to apps they install. People expect to install by dragging a package icon from one window to another, not by typing "./configure; make install", waiting 15 minutes, and then poking through your hard drive trying to figure out where the Makefile install script put its junk.
Gee, there's a great line. "Buy mac os x for the PC! But you won't be able to run any classic mac os apps! Or any commercial apps where the CDs were pressed before april of 2003, or any shareware apps, because the shareware developers will be too lazy to configure confusing FAT binaries for an archivecture they don't use! You can run Microsoft Word, IE, and Fink, though!"
I really hope apple has some plan for dealing with this, some kind of CLR-style "partial compilation" VM thing so that one executable can contain machine code for two architectures without having to take the disgustingly inefficient fat-package route. If every single application has to come with two binaries, one for each of the two architectures, and there's PPC-only shareware apps made by lazy ppc users and x86-only shareware apps made by lazy x86 users floating around.. that's just going to be the biggest mess imaginable.
I can't even imagine what it will be like trying to explain to the average iMac owner why their new software comes with two CDs, one marked "x86" and one marked "PPC". And let's not even get into devices, or software that's been written to use Altivec.
This would have been when Windows 3.1 was the best Redmond had to offer, but I'm not sure the MacOS of that era would have been much better.
Geez, are you kidding? System 7 was FAR AND AWAY better than 3.1 ever was. I remember reading a compariason of System 7 to Win 3.1 in a MacUser issue from back in '90. System 7 formed the basis of the Mac's OS for almost 10 years, and though it was showing a little bit of age as it progressed, it was still a remarkable OS.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
As such, it would suffer from all the current problems of the Apple platform: no 'cheap' (This does hold promise, though. I've been very disappointed with the GUI speed of OSX, and I'd be very interested in how much of a speedup there would be on more modern hardware.
You put out a lot of good reasons the Open Source community would want this, or could use it. But you're putting in no reason for Apple to want to do it.
.09 (Or is it .06?) micron fab IBM just built that'll produce the next generation of Apple chip.
Apple would die the quarter that OSX became an x86 commodity. On x86 hardware, they'd be dealing with all the vendors that make things for Microsoft as competition, and dealing with unhappy traditional Mac developers that just made the switch to OS X on PPC. They'd alienate the entire Apple infrastructure just to gain a few points on hardware speed that they wouldn't even be able to sell anymore. People won't pay Apple's -slightly- higher hardware prices when they can get the exact same thing (technically) for less.
Apple makes money by selling hardware, that's where the support base they have is, and that's where the company excels. The entire user experience as a whole is what drives Apple sales.
If we do see OS X on x86, we'll see it on the same Apple hardware we see today, just with a different chip in the mix. It'll all be Apple branded, no clones, no over the counter OS sales for plain-jane x86 machines.
This is the ONLY way that an x86 port of OS X makes sense to Apple.
Personally, I'm betting that it'll be the new
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.
;;winces, hits submit;;
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Note that the poster you responded to never said the PPC was more powerful than intel. They referenced the fact that when apple changed from 68k to PPC hardware, they included an emulator so that legacy apps could be run on PowerPC computers. The emulation he referred to was for third party apps which have yet to be recompiled, not for the ported OS.
All the original poster said was that while it was no big deal to emulate the 68k on the vastly more powerful PPC, emulating a PPC on an x86 would be not so easy, as x86 and PPC are roughly equal. I am not able to see where your rediculous ad hominem attack comes from. They did not even advocate PPC as more powerful than x86.
That being said, it would indeed be extremely difficult to emulate PPC on the x86! This is simply because of the way the chips are designed. The PPC is RISC; it has simple instructions and lots of registers; the x86 is CISC; has few registers and complex instructions. RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC, and the x86 is not necessarily better or worse than the PPC. However, it is generally well-known and accepted fact that it is easier to write an emulator that runs on a RISC machine than a CISC one, and it is quite obvious to anyone who is familiar with the emulation scene that the PPC and x86 are good at different things, and one of the things that the PPC really shines at is emulation.
This will become blatantly obvious if you consider that there are multiple, at least three, separately developed programs-- one of which is open source-- which emulate an x86 PC on a PPC Macintosh. There are, however, no extant PPC Macintosh emulators for the x86 PC. None. And it isn't for want of trying; you can see here that there have been a number of macintosh emulators for the PC, just that none of them have done PPC emulation, only 68k. There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing-- becuase the architecture of the two machines is simply such that it is relatively easy to emulate x86 on PPC and relatively extremely difficult to emulate PPC on x86.
I suspect i am responding to a troll. I really ought to submit this as AC. Oh well..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Something to keep in mind, is that x86 != PC. That is, just because it runs on an x86 chip, does not mean it will run on any run-of-the-mill PC. The most likely strategy, if Apple does indeed decide to switch chips, is that they will produce their own x86 processor based boxes. These would NOT be PC compatible, but would rather be Apple computers that just happen to use an x86 chip.
Of course then the only problem is backwards compatibility, unless the x86 has a large enough margin over the PPC that it can be effectively emulated (like what Apple did when they switched from 680x0 to PPC).
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
Back when PC boards were designed with red, blue, and black tape on mylar sheets, and UARTs were the cutting edge, there were two vendors of UARTs who had somewhat different designs. A small manufacturer of terminals had designed for one of 'em. But they were new and cutting edge, and the plant capacity was limited. So the vendor was being obstinate about giving them sufficient allocation to make their production targets.
Well the alternative chip was about the same side and functionality but had different pinout. And there was some extra room on the board. So a few days before the salesman was due to visit they hauled out the mylar master for the PC board, laid out the pad pattern of the alternate chip, and started taping up something that looked like reasonable circuitry.
Sure enough, the salesman saw the work in progress, concluded that the terminal was being designed so it could be built with either UART, and paniced. After that there was never a problem getting allocation.
I think the circuitry was never finished and tested. The pads made it onto the final PC board (no point in ripping the tape back off the master) but weren't even dirlled (at 1/2 cent per hole per board). And they came to be known as "The Blackmail Pads". B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course Apple have a x86 port of OS X. They want to keep their options open, and even if they don't move to x86 they will benefit by having an operating system that is already portable between architectures.
/Applications /DVD Player.app /Contents /Frameworks /DVDPlayback.framework /Versions /A /DVDPlayback | less "
l ePIVSupport
As for the evidence - it you do a "strings
(i've added spaces before each "/" to keep slashdot happy - you need to take them out again!)
Now, search for "Debug", and look at the three next lines:
DisablePIIISupport
DisableATHLONSupport
Disab
Now why would Apple's DVD Player have code concerning itself with PIII's, P4's and Athlons if they didn't have a version which ran on those chips???
Personally, I don't see Apple making the switch, but they've survived by surprising us time and time again...
All of your points are precisely why Apple won't do it:
1. Apple is a hardware company. They get their money from your $1100 iMac, not your $600 commodity iMac.
2. Steve would cringe to see Mac OS X running on your monitor. He'd make the most god-awful face, and we don't want to see that.
3. Microsoft would respond to a kick in the balls by cutting Apple's balls right off. Office X for the Mac? Sorry, it only runs on PPC macs. We had technical issues porting it.
Down the toilet, swirl swirl swirl.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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.
Apple will NEVER (read: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER) sell a version of the Mac OS that can be run on any cheap POS that you cobbled together from parts you bought in Target for $5 each. Wake up and smell the coffee, okay, because I'm getting tired of reading all your posts.
Apple sells the experience of using tightly-integrated hardware and software. They can't do that if they suddenly have to make sure their software will work with every home-built x86 whitebox on the face of the earth. What Apple does is something that Microsoft can never do, unless they start selling their own brand of computers and restrict Windows to only run on Microsoft PCs.
Even if Apple ever were to switch to making x86-based Macs (and you, the reader, are significantly more likely to bang Anna Kournikova than to see an x86-based Mac for sale), they would put something proprietary in those machines, maybe even in every component of those machines, and change the Mac OS to refuse to boot if it doesn't detect that proprietary something. That's the only way they'll be able to preserve the 'it just works' aspects that are a major part of their success.
Personally, I think Apple will,very soon, tell Motorola to go piss up a rope (and I say, it's about time!). The new IBM chip has something close enough to AltiVec, and IBM actually gives a shit about improving their products. Now that Mac OS X is truly ready for prime time with 10.2, all Apple needs is to be able to produce machines that will impress the MHz/GHz-obsessed, cock-measuring crowd.
~Philly
There are really two things to consider:
First, that Apple will solder proprietary widgets to the Macintosh motherboard which the OS will look for before booting. No widget, no boot. Simple as that.
Now you might say, "someone will reverse engineer it and then there will be rampant Mac clones," which brings us to the second point...
Second, even though it's totally possible to reverse engineer these types of widgets it's not realistic to do so. This is simply because Apple can change it willy-nilly any time they freakin' want to. Who is going to continue to invest in reverse engineering in order to remain compatible? Nobody. Don't believe it? Consider that you can buy G4 processors and you can buy all the standard Mac motherboard stuff...and absolutely nothing is stopping you from reverse engineering the proprietary widgets in use right now...and thus making your own Mac clone business...and yet nobody is doing it. I see no reason to believe that this will be a more attractive prospect just because Apple switches processors.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Sure. But we prefer to drag and drop them.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
I think the advantages of actually putting out an x86 version of os x (which by the way went by the name "Star Trek" before, IIRC) are outweighed by the various (mostly hardware-revenue related) disadvantages.
However, it's an invaluable asset to have anyway, because you can blackmail microsoft with it. Remember when MS bought all that Apple stock? Remember what dire straights Apple has been in in the past? Despite all that, Mac OS remains to this day the only consumer OS besides windows that has managed to gain and hold onto a significant userbase versus Windows. And it has a lot of software. So pretend you're Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs gives you a ring and says "If we start to go under, for any reason, we're releasing our x86 build of Mac OS X... as open source." There's not enough TP in Redmond to handle that kind of threat. Or any of the lesser ones they could make too.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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.
And here we go with an uniformed Apple elitist droning on about his superior hardware quality. I will commend Apple's recent efforts and say that they offer the most elegent package for the home user, however, they could do the same with x86 hardware. Just because you can but cheap x86 hardware does not mean that you can not build a very high quality x86 box. As an x86 OEM, apple could still build their funky cases, still design a proprietary motherboard (which most OEM's do currently), and still tightly control the hardware.
Now that Mac OS X is truly ready for prime time with 10.2, all Apple needs is to be able to produce machines that will impress the MHz/GHz-obsessed, cock-measuring crowd.
Actually, since Apple is so focused on the multimedia segment, they are really hurting on the hardware side. My $1000 Athlon box is out rendering $3000 G4 boxes. Why? Mainly because of Apples very slow FSB, and relatively slow chips. And no, I'm not just talking about clock speed, even Carmack admits that PPC's are slower then x86's for Doom, and that optimizations for Altivec only have significant value in a limited number of situations. This isn't to say that PPC's are awesome for certain tasks, especially where raw performance is not required. As you said, coupled with OS 10.2, Apple has a very good consumer product.
I'm not saying as a business decision that Apple should do this, but I'm saying that from a purely technical standpoint it would not affect the quality of Apple products.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Actually, the prices for an Apple-branded x86 machine would likely be higher, as processors from Intel and AMD are quite a bit higher than prices for PPC chips.
I'm not an expert on this subject, and this might be nothing more than uninformed speculation, but I'm guessing this is the price OEMs pay for having lots of frequent updates in processors. Intel and AMD spend a lot on R&D for these things, then have short, relatively low volume production runs leading to lower marginal profits on each unit sold.
Why would Apple want to go with x86, instead of a 64-bit processor, such as the Itanium family? It has (according to Intel) the support of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Linux. If Apple did a port to this architecture, then they could switch from PPC when the time is right.
Doesn't this make more sense than investing time and effort in the 32-bit x86 platform?
Nobody said anything about emulation. A port is a native compilation, and therefore no performance hit is taken.
This is a quarter-truth. However, you're ignoring a fair number of issues:
* A port would likely be less tweaked for the architecture (run out of registers more likely, cause cache misses, whatever) for some time.
* Apple didn't port all of the MacOS to the PPC for *ages* (actually, I'm not sure the entire OS ever went native). They just ported critical chunks, and emulated less used bits. If you want to avoid emulation, you're looking at a much larger porting task in a short period of the time.
* Apple could port the OS -- but 99% of applications won't be recompiled for the x86. That means a lot of apps need to be emulated.
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Actually, he's right, though he simplified things a bit. The PPC has far more registers than the x86 architecture. Any emulation would involve extremely expensive swapping of registers very frequently. I'm don't remember what L1 fetch time on the x86 is, but it's at least one cycle. That means that your PPC code is going to run, at best, at half speed a fair bit of the time.
The reason the PPC could emulate the 680x0 so efficiently is because it had so many registers and didn't have to execute many instructions to handle any single 680x0 instruction. Also, the PPC was a faster chip, so running slow 680x0 code still seemed reasonably peppy to the user -- trying to port PPC code to the x86, a *competitive* line, means looking at some serious slowdown issues.
I won't go so far as to call you a newbie, but your bias suggests that you have a ways to go before you become a seasoned professional. Keep on plugging though, and try to be more open-minded. Consider doing research before forming conclusions, for example.
I think that you owe it to the parent poster to do the same yourself.
May we never see th