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Date:      Tue, 29 Jun 2004 22:19:02 +0200
From:      Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de>
To:        Martin Olsson <mnemo@minimum.se>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD and MacOS
Message-ID:  <20040629201902.GA1495@britannica.bec.de>
In-Reply-To: <40E1CAAD.3000303@minimum.se>
References:  <40E1CAAD.3000303@minimum.se>

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On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 10:01:49PM +0200, Martin Olsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> * MacOS X is based on FreeBSD
> * there is a x86 kernel for FreeBSD
> 
> Does that mean I can buy a copy of MacOS X, download an x86 kernel for 
> freeBSD, do some (or quite alot of) hacking and then get MacOS X running 
> on my PC?
> 
> I realize that such hacking would be quite substantial but maybe if I 
> forgot about audio and all that, just how much work would it be? Could 
> it be done?

<irony>
Hm. Yes, that's possible. In principle, you have to write a PPC emulator
to get the programs runnable, a Darwin emulation for the OS kernel
[NetBSD might help there] and of course do a lot of testing.

On a second thought, you might just emulate a full PPC like VmWare does.
You don't really need FreeBSD for this, but having such software would be
cool, so go on :)

</irony>

OS X is based on FreeBSD, yes. But the kernel is very different now and the
greatest problems are (a) it's PPC and (b) most of the interesting stuff
isn't really affected by the kernel. So if Apple would start to distribute
e.g. OS X for IA32, yes, this would be a lot of work, but achievable. For
PPC it surely can be done and NetBSD started something already. The biggest
problem is likely to be the GUI support.

Joerg

> 
> 
> Sincerly,
> Martin Olsson
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