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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."
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.
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
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.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
http://www.osnews.com/story/25588/No_Mac_OS_X_wasn_t_ported_to_ARM_by_an_intern
I'm curious, how has Apple designed their consumer computers to take away computing freedom?
Apart from switching to x86, and including tools in OS X to make dual booting other OSes easier, and putting socketed CPUs and removable GPU boards based on MXM in the iMac, or adding extra choice for software purchases with a new distribution method (that has no effect on prior methods of obtaining software...)
I mean, sure they modified the firmware on hard drives used in the iMac to use the LED activity output to monitor the temperature, thus causing the HD fan to spin up to full if you fit a non-Apple HD in that bay, but there is a simple method to tell the iMac that a non-custom-iMac drive is installed, since it has a factory option for an SSD where this different pinout is set back to standard SATA. Some people seem to believe this engineering choice is "proof" that Apple want to make it harder for you repair your own machine... in the same generation of hardware where they switched from soldered-on CPUs to socketed ones that are replaceable with standard Intel chips from newegg. Curious!
So, how are they taking away computing freedom from home users? I mean, sure they have iOS, but are you forced to choose to use it? What was the state of "freer" handsets before and after the iPhone? Someone on here tried to argue that Apple's entry into smartphones has been bad for "open" mobile computing because before there was Symbian and Win Mobile 6 (thus, a value of 2) and afterwards there's only Android (value of 1) and 2 is bigger than 1. Despite trying to convince him that Android is in better shape than ever and offering much more as a whole than the numerically greater but technically and figuratively worse older offerings just wasn't cutting it.
It's never been better for computing choice and freedom, not only despite, but in many cases *because* of Apple - especially with the success of the iPhone (which you are free not to use, and is certainly not the "freest" handset, but has sure done a lot to push Android on).
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.