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."

Comments

So what's the implication here?

[numbski]

Are you trying to get to a point where you can run any OSX binary, including the Cocoa/Aqua environment itself?

Nifty for sure, but you start to wonder about the usefulness of this...I mean, in order to legally use the more interesting, useful parts of the OS, you would have to own a copy of OSX, unless for some reason the soft Unix underbelly of Darwin doesn't fit your needs, and you want a more traditional BSD, but still be able to use the OSX GUI.

If you're making a unix binary compatibility for just standard CLI or X-Windows, it cries out of 'what's the point'.

So what is the point?

Re:Plain English

[BrookHarty]

The post doesnt make it clear, this is about PowerPC os's and emulation. Doesnt mean you can take X86 code, and run it on the netbsd for PPC.

Remember this is binary compatibility, not emulation: programs run at full speed, but only on a NetBSD machine with the same CPU the program was designed for. Binary compatiblity does not enable running Linux/i386 binaries on NetBSD/powerpc, for instance.

So far Mac OSX only runs on PPC. So if you run NetBSD on PPC, your set. But then, Why not use MOL (Mac On Linux)?

Re:Next stop, Quartz... then Aqua

[IM6100]

Actually, that isn't the case at all.

NetBSD has a substancial cross-platform 'packages' library of source code and a robust build system. Most packages, when they appear ready for one architecture, are ready and buildable on any other architecture. If you're not going to be running MacOS stuff in that 'Macintosh' API layer(s), you're FAR BETTER OFF running NetBSD/macPPC than you are running Darwin alone on your Apple hardware. Furthermore, if you run multiple architectures, with NetBSD you'll be able to admin the same exact /etc structure on your i386, sparc, sparc64, macPPC, prep, m68k, etc. boxes.

I threw Darwin on my beige G3 machine last week, from the ISO downloadable from the OpenDarwin project. It installed fine and booted properly (I had specifically told it what drive to install itself on and it instead installed on a different drive, wiping out my MacOS 9 partition, but I don't hold a grudge about that)

I looked at the Unix command prompt, said 'gee whiz, it works, but there's no packages to run' and took it off. I noted while reading the howtos at opendarwin.org that the binary packages they have built require you to use the MacOS X installer to put them on your system.

I do not own a copy of MacOS X. It was a no-starter proposition for me. Nor am I about to buy OS X for a Beige G3 just to install 'free' software packages on it.