On Jun 9, 2005, at 7:21 PM, Stephen Hurd wrote:
John Baldwin wrote:
On Jun 8, 2005, at 10:30 PM, Stephen Hurd wrote:
As there is FreeBSD port to the PowerPC and its peripherals, this
machine will make a very interesting target for FreeBSD: combine
the x86 code base with the PowerPC drivers and get a real hot
machine.
The *really* hot machine is going to be the OSX ABI supported under
FreeBSD and running Aqua. I betcha this happens FAST.
I doubt it would be fast at all if it even happens. Unlike Linux,
svr4, and ibcs2, OS X is not just a POSIXish UNIX kernel. It also
includes mach so there would have to be a lot of emulation to support
that. OS X also tends to define its interface not at the kernel
syscall level but at the library API level (from what I have heard),
which means that it might require having custom versions of the base
system frameworks ala Wine which would be an enormous amount of work.
But the ABI support is about emulating the kernel ABI, not about
emulating the kernel. Since the *nix userland is mostly FreeBSD
afaik, the ABI must be pretty darn close already. If the interface is
via libraries, that makes it MORE likely not less to happen fast...
unless I misunderstand something. ABI emulation doesn't replace the
libraries. You'd still need a copy of OSX to run OSX binaries that
used the shared libs (Just like all the other ABI emulations).
Two things. First, OS X's kernel ABI includes things like Mach IPC,
etc. that would require a good bit of code to emulate. Secondly, since
OS X's ABI is at the library level, they are freer to change the kernel
ABI within a 10.x "branch" making it harder to get an ABI that will
work with all versions of Panther or Tiger for example.
--
John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve" = http://www.FreeBSD.org
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