FreeBSD on x86 provides support for Linux binaries. In other words, the OS provides compatibility libraries so that apps written to a Linux API set have any non-BSD-compatible calls redirected to the BSD ABIs, and can therefore run without recompilation. (FreeBSD also claims to provide similar support for Solaris x86 and some other stuff as well).
Now I emphasise that I haven't yet tried this stuff myself. It may not work as well as is claimed on the box. But in principle cross-UNIX support of this kind should be trivial.
Given that FreeBSD is (partly) the foundation definition for Darwin, and given that there are ports of Linux for PPC (such as Yellow Dog, the port of RedHat), there is no obvious reason why the same thing should not be done for Darwin and hence Mac OS X. All the foundation elements are there: a FreeBSD-like base, an X11 display server, an available collection of PowerPC Linux applications as created for Yellow Dog. The missing layer is the glue to map the Linux PPC ABIs to the BSD PPC ABIs. I would guess this could be a relatively trivial port of the same glue layer currently provided by FreeBSD for x86.
Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but does anyone know of work being done to make this happen? You would have thought it in Apple's interests to support Linux apps out of the box, but with Apple you never can tell. Perhaps this is a "feature" planned for OS X 10.4? Any clues?
Note in passing that if Apple included this for a future OS X on PPC, they would also have sorted it for the OS X on x86 which they keep lurking in the back-room. So imagine, an OS X on x86 which is also a first class Linux client and can run Linux apps alongside OS X apps. Gotta wonder where that might lead.
GWW
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