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Running Mac OS X Binaries With NetBSD
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about an effort to add a Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer to NetBSD. The project has evidently already made a fair amount of progress, currently working to stabilize the WindowServer emulation portion that will then allow NetBSD to run Mac OS X graphical applications."
That's great, really, but what is there to discuss? Now we can run apps from OS X on OS Y (my apologies), happy day. Next topic!
evil adrian
It's only the NetBSD/powerpc port. The biggest problem with MacOSX is that it only runs on Macs. If I'm going to pay all that money for a shiny new Mac, I'm going to run Apple's shiny new operating system.
Someone stole my old sig.
But one question: is there anything Apple can do to stop this?
If you remember, they've been *very* anal in the past about some things they consider to be "their stuff", such as the look and feel of the OS. I can't see them just sitting around and watching while all their OS capabilities are matched (or, for that matter, exceeded).
If they sent C&D letters for freakin' themes, I doubt they'll just sit around while their API is emulated. They've show themselves to be rather devious, and I'd be a little worried if I was a NetBSD developer.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Oh now look what you did: You woke the swarming team of Apple lawers on a beautiful sunday morning. They're going to be extra pissed.
_______
2B1ASK1
Or should that me...of course NetBSD runs it? Whew...imagine the possibilities. NetBSD runs on next to anything, and can run binaries in all those formats. /me installs NetBSD on his watch and tries to load Mail.app Dangit! Doesn't work. What crap is this???
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
to use this, since it is only binary compatability. So You will still need to buy PowerPC based computers. And who is one of the largest and most noted for selling powerPC based PCs... Apple Computer; so why not just run MacOS X?
I know you can buy third party PowerPC computer, but they are more expense than Apple's machines.
I do appricated their effort, it is probably a good exercise in programming skill.
It would be useful if it was on x86, but there are plenty of problems with that; see
http://www.emaculation.com/ppc.shtml
(This is not a flame, just an observation)
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
What works?
On NetBSD/i386: nothing. On NetBSD/powerpc, most UNIX binaries, such as ls, sh, or vi will work. No Graphical User Interface (GUI) based program will work for now. We are able to startup WindowServer up to the first attemps to use the IOKit. See the kernel traces for WindowServer and for mach_init to discover how far we have been.
Here is what have been implemented so far:
Mach-O binaries loading
Mach system calls handling
Minimal Mach ports, messages and rights support, so that simple program are able to link and run.
Signals handling (except for siginfo) Minimal multithreading support
Support in ktrace/kdump to display Mach messages (useful for debugging)
Hacks to get mach_init starting (and to get it behaving as bootstrap mach_init)
Support for port rights carried by Mach messages
Here is what is in the TODO list:
Implement Mach notifications for destroyed ports, dead names, and no sender ports
Re-implement enough of Darwin's IOKit to get
WindowServer actually displaying something.
Use COMPAT_MACH for COMPAT_OSF1 (Tru64 binary emulation on NetBSD/alpha), to get multithreading working.
Get Darwin binaries to link and run on NetBSD/i386
Quite wrong. These guys are making a binary compatability layer, not emulation. You will not be able to run OS X applications on an x86 box running NetBSD, only a PPC box running NetBSD.
... you only have to make sure both your windows and OS X binaries are for the same processor architecture.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Running Gnustep on NetBSD? It has most of the NEXTStep/OS X libs already ported over to Linux (And therefore easily ported to NetBSD)...
GNUStep is already in the NetBSD packages collection, in several packages split across devel and x11. Install it along with WindowMaker and you've got a convincing NeXT clone ...
Chris
Mac-On-Linux
OK, it's not binary compatibility, but unlike COMPAT_MACH and COMPAT_DARWIN it does already work. But COMPAT_MACH and COMPAT_DARWIN are very interesting and worth keeping an eye on it.
Oh, BTW.... From the MOL-FAQ:
GNUStep allows for source-level compatibility. This is good for people who plan on targeting Mac OS X as well as Linux, but it's not good for people who want to run Mac OS X apps that run on Mac OS X but not on Linux, such as the Mac OS X window server and Finder. These applications would never be ported to GNUStep, as easy as it is, because Apple wouldn't do it. In addition, this should allow Carbon applications as well as Cocoa applications to run on NetBSD.
Um...I use MOL and have found it to be far from pointless. I use MOL mostly to run a FirstClass groupware client. The reason why I run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook is that I have an environment mostly identical to my x86 Linux machine at home. This means Linux largely frees me from worrying about underlying architecture (Wine and so forth aside). I have not found OSX to be so insanely great that I should blow away my Linux partition. Believe it or not there are good reasons to prefer Linux over OSX.
I have also found MOL to be far more reliable than Classic on OSX. Classic is much slicker in that OS 9 apps run directly on the Quartz desktop and one can cut and paste between apps. This also means it is more complex and therefore failure prone. My boss has no end of trouble with it. Classic icons go missing or change themselves into another apps icons. Some Classic apps will lock and won't release control to the Aqua UI. This means the machine is locked up for end user intents and purposes. Classic inflicts HFS metadata problems and some instability on OS X and kills much of OS X advantages if one has to make heavy use of OS <=9 apps. On the other hand if the OS 9 in my MOL sessions screws up then I can kill it and restart without affecting my Linux session. Since I boot my MOL session from an image I have an advantage normally only associated with virtual PC. If that boot image gets messed up, I can replace it from a backup quickly. Incidentally, MOL is very close to running OS X acceptably...eye candy and all.
MOL is can also be used as a user mode Linux. One can boot another acceptably fast Linux inside a virtual machine. This is useful for things like kernel development. MOL is far from pointless.
No, from the page:
Once we will have a fully functionnal Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc (if that happens some day), we will just have to grab MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program
This means, NetBSD might have the original OS X GUI (including overhead and eye candy effects ^_^) in the future.
Making GNUstep binary compatibe with Quartz should be the solution you're looking for (in that case, it would also work with the original Darwin).
You're making a lot of assumptions. Firstly, that such an emulation system could be completed in any reasonable amount of time, and could keep up with Apple. Obviously, that isn't the same kind of issue as it is with Wine as Apple is a lot smaller, and to be frank, Windows has far more APIs and features to the developer than OS X does (at present).
Secondly, you're assuming Apple would let this happen. They can't stop a cleanroom implementation, but they can copyright the artwork which is a big deal to Mac users. Wine has to have its own artwork for instance (but not for the widget toolkit, as the Win98 L&F is so basic it can't really be copyrighted). Not that nice distinctions like code vs art would bother Apple, they have a long history of abusive lawsuits.
Finally you're assuming that such an emulator could emulate PPC opcodes at a reasonable speed, which is a) hard and b) unlikely.
Bear in mind that doesn't say "You can run MacOS apps on NetBSD", far from it, they have some of the basics of Mach IPC working. They haven't even started on graphics support. If there's something we've all learnt from Wine (which has 2 companies working on it as well as hundreds of volunteers), it's that cloning another OS's APIs is a lot of work, and as most of the MacOS APIs are not simply lifts of their UNIX equivalents, they are Apple proprietary (iokit/coreaudio etc), that's no less amount of work.
Notice the part you didn't quote:
"Once we will have a fully functionnal Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc (if that happens some day), we will just have to grab Mac OS X libraries to run any MacOS X program"
I.e. you would still have to have the whole Mac OS windowing, graphical, and multimedia (QuickTime) environment for something like Photoshop to run. That's a far cry from just getting Darwin running.
The only legal way to get the Mac OS libraries is to buy Mac OS from Apple. Or reimplement them in a legally defensible way. Good freaking luck.
A question..
..it will not harm you!
The status report link is from 1/2002...
Did anybody bother to read it before posting?
70 people so far did not..
The actual project ot watch is not NetBSd..in that they don't have the nice Apple relationship like Darwin does..
In fact if my memory is right the proejct was stopped because they were duplicating Darwin's efforts..
To see if MacOSx will run under intel machines check Darwin porject site not NetBSD!
Come on People read once in awhile
Show yourself to better than those wintel geeks who don't even read but jsut spout what MS Gates wants..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Umm.... you could just buy a Mac and VirtualPC, then install Xfree86 in rootless mode. Seems like a simpler means to the stated end, considering that a Mac running Mac OS X is a "unix box".
Only idealists can make positive change.
That's overly simplistic. As usual, reality is a lot more complicated.
There is no doubt that idealists (radicals if you will) can be a catalyst for change. But it's extremely rare that they actually make the changes. Almost by definition, idealists are incapable of implementing change because they want instant gratification and are impatient with the realities of implementation. And even then, they are often incapable of seeing a larger picture that reasonable people can disagree with their "idealism". Take environmentalism. If the typical idealist enviro had their way, every forest would be off-limits to logging. Period. But the ignores the reality that logging is not intrinsically evil, and that wood is a renewable resource.
I'm reminded of one of my favorite scenes from Lawrence of Arabia:
Feisal: The world is delighted at the picture of Damascus liberated by the Arab army.
Allenby: Led, may I remind you, sir, by a British-serving officer.
Feisal: Ah yes. But then Lawrence is a sword with two edges. We are equally glad to be rid of him, are we not?
Allenby: I thought I was a hard man, sir.
Feisal: You are merely a general. I must be a king...
It's up to us realists to slowly, painfully -- but practically and fairly -- make the changes that society needs. We are the ones that are most capable of seeing all the sides of an issue and balancing everyone's needs.
Like I said, idealists have a place as catalysts to move things along quicker than they might have moved along, simply because they raise the priority of something. But it's unfair and untrue to say that realists never make changes without them, because its simply untrue. Idealists just believe that to be true because the pace is always slower than they want it, and they don't see the realists as having the "passion" of change.
I agree with you about opportunists to some extent, in that they aren't often dedicated to "progress". However, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen by accident. Opportunists create a lot of jobs, which is the single greatest resource that can be created when it comes to social progress.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.