apple moving to x86

[John Baldwin]

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.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org