BTW, I notice that some other projects (NetBSD for instance) take OS emulation very seriously. NetBSD aims to provide simultaneous support for every common variant of unix-like OS known for each particular hardware architecture.
So, given that other BSDs are managing to provide support for pre-compiled non-native apps, there's no obvious reason why Darwin, and hence Mac OS X, can't do the same. Either on PPC; or on x86.
Either the FreeBSD or the NetBSD code might be good places to start.
Gerald.
On 16 Dec 2003, at 23:31, Ed Murphy wrote:
--- Peter da Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Yes. But my understanding is that fink is for ported unix apps. I'm talking about unported apps. In other words, apps designed for PPC Linux, which in principle could be made to run on OS X unchanged. I think.
A Linux app *is* a UNIX app.
I believe Fink is a toolkit designed to make porting source level code to
Darwin much easier. Unix variations have differences in headers and place and
form of settings, etc. Fink makes this stuff easier to deal with at the source
code level.
The original question was about running compiled apps on Darwin without needing
any recompile. So, for instance, running the version of Gimp that has been
compiled for YellowDog Linux directly on Darwin. Darwin cannot currently do
this. FreeBSD can run the version of Gimp compiled for RedHat on PeeCees
because it has a layer that can load the RedHat executable format and can
translated api calls on the fly that may be different in FreeBSD. The
translation layer adds some overhead, but it is very compatible.
A clearly defined and supported executable format, loader and runtime
environment made this possible on PeeCees. Do all versions (or most important
versions) of Linux on PPC use the same executable format etc.? If so, it makes
this kind of project feasible. The FreeBSD code may be a place to start.
Ed
===== ----------------- Ed Murphy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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