On Dec 3, 2010, at 9:04 PM, Justin The Cynical wrote:
Looking around on google, I'm only finding old and apparently
abandoned
web sites, if they even exist any longer and not much in the way of
archives on archive.org
So, does anyone know of an active site, IRC channel, or even still
have
the info for doing this?
It would appear that the hackers who were formerly active in hacking
PC video cards for use on G4 (and other PPC) Macs have moved on to
hacking MacOS itself to run on unmodified PC hardware.
Some of these folks are in developing countries where gen-u-wine
Apple hardware is non-existent, or it costs several year's wages.
Russia is one place where such hacking is going on. Also Argentina.
Here in the USA, hacking is going on, too, with some significant
efforts in the installation and customization areas.
The goal has always been to boot MacOS X on PC hardware with MacOS
itself being unmodified. Even to the extent of using an unmodified
"retail" installation DVD.
This has largely been achieved, most notably through utilization of
the EFI partition which is a functional part of any Intel-based PC or
Mac, but which partition is unused by MacOS X. The PC's second and
subsequent stage boot loaders are placed there, in this "hidden"
partition, each phase of which contributes to the eventual hand-off
to MacOS X itself.
It used to be that loads of mods were necessary to the contents of
the /System/Extensions folder, but even these mods have been all but
eliminated.
Most of the operational mods are now in a new /Extra folder, which
MacOS X ignores, and the DSDT is contained there, along with,
usually, four extensions which are involved in kernel decrypting,
sound and networking support.
For installation, there is no MacOS X environment, so that part is
simulated using a RAMDISK concept borrowed from Linux. The stuff
which would be in the EFI partition and the /Extra folder are in the
RAMDISK, and the MacOS X Installer just goes merrily on its way
creating an instance of MacOS X on the target hard drive.
The just-installed MacOS X is booted for the first time, also using
the RAMDISK, and then the EFI partition and the /Extra folder are
created by a special application.
The next and all subsequent boots are as if the PC really was a Mac.
I suppose this is not too unlike the original developer's hardware,
from back in the "first public beta" of 10.4.8, which was presumably
on an Intel motherboard without the TPM support.
Indeed, PC motherboards are now available with TPM support, but that
does no one any good as the decryption key is missing.
No matter as it is rather easy to decrypt the MacOS X kernel using
software, and once decrypted, it need not be decrypted again, at
least not until the MacOS X system is again rebooted.
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