Mach/Darwin Binary Compatibility Hacker Interviewed

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?""

Comments

Good...

[CoolVibe]

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.

Re:Good...

[Matthias Wiesmann]

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...

Re:Good...

[ocelotbob]

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