Long Term Ideas

[Owen Anderson]

Hey folks,

I was just sitting here thinking, and had a few ideas that I thought 
were interesting.  In particular, I was reading an article about how 
IRIX compatibility in NetBSD worked, and I was thinking that binary 
compatiblity in FreeBSD for AIX and/or Mac OS X would be interesting.  
Granted this would be a TON of work (and quite a ways down the road 
considering how close/near FreeBSD-PowerPC is to usable), but as a long 
term plan I think it would be a great idea.  It would definitely put 
this port on the map, as even NetBSD does not have binary compatibility 
on the PowerPC platform.

Now, here's a more extended list of things the I need to ponder:

1)  Could Mac OS X's Mach-O loader be ported to FreeBSD?  How do the 
APSL licensing terms work with stuff like that?

2) Is AIX built like, say, SVR4?  I know that NetBSD has SVR4 and IRIX 
compatibility, and I was under the impression the FreeBSD has at least 
SVR4, but I've never actually checked that out.  If so, then in theory 
supporting AIX shouldn't be terribly bad, more a matter of working with 
any variations it presents from the other Unices (Executable format?)

3) Since almost all of Mac OS X's underlying libraries are Open Source 
in one way or another, achieving wide support shouldn't be too bad.  
The only closed libraries I'm aware of are the UI ones, and unless 
someone wants to write a WINE-like runtime for it, I doubt we need to 
worry about that.

Anyways, those are tonight's ramblings.  Feel free to tell me I'm an 
idiot and it's impossible, or that I definitely need to go to sleep.  
But I am really looking forward to being able to run FreeBSD on my Mac 
one day!

Owen Anderson