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NetBSD's COMPAT_DARWIN Adds XDarwin Support
Dan writes "NetBSD's Emmanual Dreyfus says that COMPAT_DARWIN is now able to run Mac OS X's XDarwin (this is, the X Window server for Darwin). The server is fully functional: display, keyboard and mouse work. He says that running Darwin has no interest in itself, but having it working ensures that NetBSD's IOKit (1) emulation is good enough to be used. Darwin is Apple's Mac OS X core. A fully functional Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc & NetBSD/i386 will imply getting MacOS X libraries to run any Mac OS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes."
The goal is to run MacOS X's programs on NetBSD/powerpc. One of the problems is that thoses programs do not use X11, they use quartz.
We have no free software display server for Quartz. Emmanuel Dreyfus had three options to get the job done:
1) Write a Quartz display server
2) Write a Quartz to X11 bridge
3) Emulate enough of MacOS X to get MacOS X's Quartz display server to run on NetBSD.
He chose option 3. It is not an easy job since MacOS X I/O are done through the IOKit, which completely differs from UNIX I/O API.
XDarwin is the X11 server for MacOS X. It uses the IOKit to access the display, keyboard and mouse. Having XDarwin fully fonctionnal on NetBSD means that NetBSD IOKit emulation is in good shape. It is the first step on the right direction.
Next step is to run MacOS X's Quartz display server itself.