Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM

An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."

Comments

apple tv?

[vlm]

Assumption is its for the new mac book.
Would be funny if it turns out to be the much rumored apple tv.

Re:Apple history

[brwski]

And not only that, this is in NeXTStep's DNA. That OS was made for portability, and ran on at least (if this link is accurate) four different processor families. Apple also had a concurrent build of OS X on Intel while they sold PowerPC machines. Fat Binaries also would allow Apple, if they felt like it, to make the CPU all but invisible to the user for properly recompiled programs, letting them have multiple processors in their lineup (this does, however, leave anything older or not recompiled out in the cold; that doesn't seem to matter much to Apple, however).

This is just smart business; something goes wrong with Intel, they're ready. A new, decent competitor pops up? port it, and if it proves to be better, run with it. To not to have these projects going would seem to be a mistake.