Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM 368
An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."
NVIDIA (Score:5, Informative)
NVIDIA is also working on high-end desktop/workstation ARM CPUs, under "Project Denver".
If something compelling emerges, perhaps ARM could be a player for sheer compute power.
Fat binaries might be useful again... ;-)
Dissertation PDF (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not this again (Score:4, Informative)
Um... the A4 and A5 are ARM chips. That's what they're talking about this hypothetical MacBook Air running on.
"A more likely scenario is a MacBook Air based upon iOS with a built-in touchscreen."
An iPad with a keyboard? Not likely. But what kind of processor would make most sense to put in such a device? How about one that iOS already runs on: ARM.
Re:Does it actualy matter? (Score:5, Informative)
OS X is nowhere near "totally locked down".
But to answer your question, it matters to anyone who wants to be able to run apps written and compiled for a different CPU.
OS News has a followup on this article (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.osnews.com/story/25588/No_Mac_OS_X_wasn_t_ported_to_ARM_by_an_intern
Re:Collude to take away freedom (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious, how has Apple designed their consumer computers to take away computing freedom?
Apart from switching to x86, and including tools in OS X to make dual booting other OSes easier, and putting socketed CPUs and removable GPU boards based on MXM in the iMac, or adding extra choice for software purchases with a new distribution method (that has no effect on prior methods of obtaining software...)
I mean, sure they modified the firmware on hard drives used in the iMac to use the LED activity output to monitor the temperature, thus causing the HD fan to spin up to full if you fit a non-Apple HD in that bay, but there is a simple method to tell the iMac that a non-custom-iMac drive is installed, since it has a factory option for an SSD where this different pinout is set back to standard SATA. Some people seem to believe this engineering choice is "proof" that Apple want to make it harder for you repair your own machine... in the same generation of hardware where they switched from soldered-on CPUs to socketed ones that are replaceable with standard Intel chips from newegg. Curious!
So, how are they taking away computing freedom from home users? I mean, sure they have iOS, but are you forced to choose to use it? What was the state of "freer" handsets before and after the iPhone? Someone on here tried to argue that Apple's entry into smartphones has been bad for "open" mobile computing because before there was Symbian and Win Mobile 6 (thus, a value of 2) and afterwards there's only Android (value of 1) and 2 is bigger than 1. Despite trying to convince him that Android is in better shape than ever and offering much more as a whole than the numerically greater but technically and figuratively worse older offerings just wasn't cutting it.
It's never been better for computing choice and freedom, not only despite, but in many cases *because* of Apple - especially with the success of the iPhone (which you are free not to use, and is certainly not the "freest" handset, but has sure done a lot to push Android on).
How "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? (Score:4, Informative)
[Industry-wide lockdown] already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Happened decades ago with everything Apple too.
I agree with you that it happened long ago with iPod and iPhone, but how "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? A copy of Xcode is bundled with every Mac (or at least was bundled with a Mac mini in the third quarter of 2009), and the computer's user can use it to develop Mac apps on a Mac without paying any separate annual fee.
Re:Apple history (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How "decades ago" and how "everything Apple"? (Score:4, Informative)
If it's not still bundled, it's a free download from the App Center.
Darwin != OS X (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says he ported Darwin - the open-source version of the OS X kernel - and got as far as a multi-user login prompt (he'd need some of the BSD toolchain to get that far, but you could run BSD on the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes in the early 90s). Not to be sneezed at as an intern project - but a long, long way from porting "OS X".
Its the difference between porting "Linux" (in the correct sense of the name - i.e. the kernel) and porting Linux + GNU tools + X.Org + KDE/Gnome + ... in order to make something resembling modern Linux distro.
Not that its remotely unfeasible to port OS X to ARM (nobody outside of Apple knows how much of iOS code is directly ported from OS X but economic common sense says "as much as possible") and I'd be unsurprised if Apple had an ARM-based Mac lashed up behind a closed door at Infinite Loop. Apple know a thing or two about supporting multiple processor architectures and It might just make sense as a stop-gap between the iPad and the Air if it offered size/weight/power savings over Intel. Feasible, but probably not likely.
More like 6+, depending on what you count... (Score:4, Informative)
If you're willing to include software that was developed, but not released, there are:
m68k (original NeXT hardware)
i386 (NEXTSTEP for Intel processors)
SPARC (NEXTSTEP for SPARC)
HPPA (NEXTSTEP for PA-RISC)
Motorola m88k (NeXT RISC Workstation - never released, but a working copy was at Apple when I worked there)
PowerPC (Mac OS X Server 1.0, later developed into Mac OS X)
Significant bits of NeXT software were also ported to Intel i860 and DEC Alpha, but not enough of the OS to actually qualify as a "NEXTSTEP port"