Slashdot Mirror
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."
NVIDIA is also working on high-end desktop/workstation ARM CPUs, under "Project Denver".
If something compelling emerges, perhaps ARM could be a player for sheer compute power.
Fat binaries might be useful again... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Its not like Apple hasn't changed CPU architectures before. 68K->ppc->intel and if you want to count the Apple II, you can also include 6502->68k
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You have to click through a lot of links to get there, but the PDF of his dissertation is online at his university's website: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:2f66fe0c-4080-4148-a01c-acd530160797/Report_BSc_complete.pdf
Sounds like standard intern hazing.
"Hey, Tim, take this source code (*drops huge book of source on desk*) and port it to... uh... ARM."
**12 weeks later.**
"Holy crap, he made it work."
At least it wasn't SPARC.
Assumption is its for the new mac book.
Would be funny if it turns out to be the much rumored apple tv.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you really like freedom a little bit, you need to be on your guard lest all manufacturers of computing devices priced for home users collude to design their products to take away the computing freedom of home users. This already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Apple is certainly big enough at this point to support two architectures. You may or may not be aware that, with Xcode, generating a fat binary supporting multiple CPU architectures involves nothing more than a setting. Of course testing may not be quite that smooth, especially at first.
At any rate, I'm quite sure Apple won't drop x86 support for the foreseeable future. However, there may be some real advantages to supporting both, including price competition for Intel.
Don't forget that Microsoft has already promised Windows for ARM (NVIDIA's "Project Denver"), so it may also be in Apple's best interest to be a player there as well - especially if the NVIDIA CPUs have some real advantages.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
It's no secret that one of the reasons Intel is subsidizing manufacturers over $100M for the Ultrabook project is to keep ARM at bay. This is compounded by Microsoft offering a ARM version of Windows. Apple putting out a really nice A8 MacBook Air could really shake things up.
However, the real issue Apple is going to have is MacOS or iOS. There's a lot of compelling reasons to move to iOS for Apple, but ultimately the closed nature of iOS would likely alienate the large programmer base they have built up.
Um... the A4 and A5 are ARM chips. That's what they're talking about this hypothetical MacBook Air running on.
"A more likely scenario is a MacBook Air based upon iOS with a built-in touchscreen."
An iPad with a keyboard? Not likely. But what kind of processor would make most sense to put in such a device? How about one that iOS already runs on: ARM.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Getting in the door with an internship is quickly becoming the best way to not get paid to do something you weren't hired to do.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Apparently you don't understand that the 30% is essentially the cost of running the store. Apple makes only a little bit of profit on the App Store.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
OS X is nowhere near "totally locked down".
But to answer your question, it matters to anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
http://www.osnews.com/story/25588/No_Mac_OS_X_wasn_t_ported_to_ARM_by_an_intern
I'm reminded of this joke.
http://www.tensionnot.com/jokes/operating_systems_and_airlines
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Adobe deserves to die imho. They were indeed dragged kicking and screaming. Same for MS Office. You either adapt or die, if your code is so shitty you can't port it between slightly different architectures without breaking it, you have a really bad development team.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Um the closed console model for phones existed long before Apple. The reason most people don't remember back then didn't buy many apps because they were all shit. And back then it was the carrier controlling the access not the phones manufacturer. And you were lucky to get if the store only took 45%.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's just tepples. He lives to complain about Apple, logic need not apply. He'd complain that Apple products are racist because they are all white (if you conveniently ignore the other colors they have in their products).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's like saying America is socialist because of the welfare state or is laissez-faire because we have a robust capitalist system. Neither is true and it is a matter of degrees.
Not being open source doesn't make something "completely locked down." If that's what you want, more power to you, download Linux or FreeBSD.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Apple's official financial statements have confirmed year over year that they do not make much at all on the store - the 30% really just covers the cost of running the thing. That's not the point of the exercise for them, though - the store exists to drive hardware sales, and the third party developers are a major part of that.
If you're stuck thinking that the 30% cut is some sort of daylight robbery or "quite bad" then you really have no idea what the costs (in time, resources and hassle) it is to handle distribution yourself.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
[Industry-wide lockdown] already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Happened decades ago with everything Apple too.
I agree with you that it happened long ago with iPod and iPhone, but how "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? A copy of Xcode is bundled with every Mac (or at least was bundled with a Mac mini in the third quarter of 2009), and the computer's user can use it to develop Mac apps on a Mac without paying any separate annual fee.
Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository?
Do you really think that the app store is a simple software repository? Apple writes and maintains the software to interface with the apps, runs the billing system and pays the credit card fees, vets apps and handles legal issues, buys bandwidth and server space, performs advertising, etc.
This is all done on a much larger and more involved scale than the usual "set it and forget it" software repository. Obviously Apple does make some profit from the app store but there's no doubt that they have significant expenditures in running the thing. Is 30% too much? Not when you compare it to how much other distribution channels take off the top. I'm sure if there is more competition then you'll see that 30% get shaved but right now 30% is pretty darn nice for what you get.
Sapere aude!
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen.
An oligopoly isn't especially a free market. Microsoft has announced that it will require OEMs of devices running Windows 8 for ARM to configure UEFI such that it won't boot anything but Windows 8.
That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down.
This almost happened with the SSSCA/CBDTPA proposal. It's also starting to happen with a patent land grab on the part of companies opposed to free computing, namely Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft in particular rakes in royalties for Android equal to those for Windows Phone 7.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand.
Take this scenario for example: A locked computer costs $200, and an unlocked computer costs $2,000, and you have to be an established business with a secure office to qualify to buy an unlocked computer (source: warioworld.com among others). To what extent will the market demand unlocked computers under such conditions?
One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one!
But will it stay sub $50, or will the price shoot up as they run out of stock and people start reselling them for a 300% premium or more on eBay, like a recently launched game console?
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s). Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome + ... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
You do have freedom. Apple has never said that they were it. If you want freedom go for Android. But the flip side is you are more likely to get malware.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you're willing to include software that was developed, but not released, there are:
m68k (original NeXT hardware)
i386 (NEXTSTEP for Intel processors)
SPARC (NEXTSTEP for SPARC)
HPPA (NEXTSTEP for PA-RISC)
Motorola m88k (NeXT RISC Workstation - never released, but a working copy was at Apple when I worked there)
PowerPC (Mac OS X Server 1.0, later developed into Mac OS X)
Significant bits of NeXT software were also ported to Intel i860 and DEC Alpha, but not enough of the OS to actually qualify as a "NEXTSTEP port"