Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mach/Darwin Binary Compatibility Hacker Interviewed

Posted by timothy on from the how-ya-doin dept.

chromatic writes "Following up on an earlier story on NetBSD's fledgling Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer, I've interviewed Emmanuel Dreyfus, who leads the project. The key questions are "what is it?", "what is it not?", and "what does it mean?""

5 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Good... by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Funny
    If you read the previous slashdot stoy, this confused a lot of people. I hope it's all clear now.

    So, now I can run Darwin/OS X apps on my mac. Cool.

    1. Re:Good... by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 4, Insightful
      While Apple is certainly the main supplier of PPC based PCs, this emulation layer could make it possible to run Mac OS X on different PPC based machines that have some kind of NetBSD support:
      • Unsupported Apple machines.
      • IBM RS600 machines.
      • BeOS machines.
      • PowerPC-based evaluation boards.
      • Motorola MVME PowerPC SBCs.
      • PowerPC-based Amiga boards.
      Whenever it makes sense to run Mac OS X on those beasts is another question altogether. Many of them probably don't have the horsepower for the GUI - some of them even don't have displays. The good news is that the lack of new PPC processor forces Apple to continue to optimise their system.

      I suppose that if Mac OS X can run acceptably on one of those beasts, it will make sense to port darwin directly to it - in order for instance to use things like IO/Kit, but until then, it means people will be able to experiment and play. Heck! imagine if such a compatibility layer existed for Linux, you could run Mac OS X of an AS/400...

    2. Re:Good... by ocelotbob · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's definitely possible. It works pretty much like VMware, but it allows you to run OS X binaries on any PPC machine.

      --

      Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

  2. Only if you run Apple's GUI implementation by yerricde · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I am a bit sketchy on Dreyfus's comment about NetBSD/Darwin compatibility requiring a Mac OS X user license.

    From the article: "Therefore, in order to run a dynamically-linked application, you need the libraries from the emulated OS. The libraries are part of the emulated OS, and if you use them, you need a license for it."

    It means you need a Mac OS X license ($0 with your PPC G3 or G4 processor based Macintosh computer unless it came with Mac OS 8.x or 9.x) to run Apple's implementation of the WindowServer libraries. You don't need such a license to run Cocoa binaries if and when somebody writes a WindowServer API compatible wrapper around gnustep.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  3. Re:Mach by RevAaron · · Score: 2

    Some people seem to think it is slow. Not just Mach- it's usually a generalization made across all message passing microkernels vs. monolithic kernels. And a lot of times, it probably is a wee bit slower, but the argument that what is gained makes it worth it.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad