Long Term Ideas

[Peter Grehan]

Hi Owen,

> as even NetBSD does not have binary compatibility
> on the PowerPC platform.

 There's been quite a bit of work on OSX Mach emulation, aka COMPAT_DARWIN,
on NetBSD/PPC:

   http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/01/09/manu_interview.html
   http://hcpnet.free.fr/applebsd.html

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

 It'd be better to start with the NetBSD stuff to avoid APSL issues.

> 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?)

 I'd say supporting AIX binaries would be a lot of work: it's quite a bit
different from SVR4 in terms of the PPC ABI and also system calls.

> 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.

 I don't know that the command-line apps are that interesting: it's really
stuff like the window server and iTunes that people would like to run :-)
 
> But I am really looking forward to being able to run FreeBSD on my Mac
> one day!

 OK, hopefully that won't be too far away.

later,

Peter.