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."
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
Apple history (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not like Apple hasn't changed CPU architectures before. 68K->ppc->intel and if you want to count the Apple II, you can also include 6502->68k
Collude to take away freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free lunch!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
OS X's darwin kernel already runs on ARM (Score:2, Insightful)
Since the various ARM SoC devices are radically different in how they boot and ennumerate devices a 12 week port time is pretty impressive but Darwin aready runs on arm v5 (and v7). iOS uses the darwin kernel. Since this was a marvell and not a samsung/apple A device a lot of work would have to be done to get the kernel to boot but the basic build system already fully supports ARM.
It's not a secret Apple keeps their options open arch-wise. After the switch the Intel it came out apple had an x86 build of darwin running for years before the switch was decided on. Keeping code portable is a good way to flush out bugs you might have otherwised missed and allows apple to try projects like iOS without a massive effort to get the basic system up and running.
iPAD and iPhone will obiovusly be getting arm v8 chips in a few generations. And I could see apple doing a hybrid macbook air that uses an arm chip to do background network access and the like but it's going to be a long time before ARM chips are playing in even Sandy Bridge territory, let alone what Intel will have in 2 years. I really don't see an arm-only apple notebook anytime soon.
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Insightful)
And considering an intern could port a complete OS port in a mere 12 weeks, shows how portable it is. This person presumably had never touched the OS-X source before, yet manages to pull it off. And indeed I recall rumours that OS-X was running on Intel from before the time the rumours came that Apple was planning to switch to Intel. I suppose portability is simply part of the demands by management. I don't think Microsoft will have such an easy time if they were ever to switch to another architecture.
And those driver issues: no surprise. That's by nature fairly low-level stuff talking directly to hardware so will need more work. Not counting third-party drivers of course.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iOS developer program copied from Xbox 360 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it actualy matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying America is socialist because of the welfare state or is laissez-faire because we have a robust capitalist system. Neither is true and it is a matter of degrees.
Not being open source doesn't make something "completely locked down." If that's what you want, more power to you, download Linux or FreeBSD.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Apple's official financial statements have confirmed year over year that they do not make much at all on the store - the 30% really just covers the cost of running the thing. That's not the point of the exercise for them, though - the store exists to drive hardware sales, and the third party developers are a major part of that.
If you're stuck thinking that the 30% cut is some sort of daylight robbery or "quite bad" then you really have no idea what the costs (in time, resources and hassle) it is to handle distribution yourself.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think it costs that much to run a software repository?
Do you really think that the app store is a simple software repository? Apple writes and maintains the software to interface with the apps, runs the billing system and pays the credit card fees, vets apps and handles legal issues, buys bandwidth and server space, performs advertising, etc.
This is all done on a much larger and more involved scale than the usual "set it and forget it" software repository. Obviously Apple does make some profit from the app store but there's no doubt that they have significant expenditures in running the thing. Is 30% too much? Not when you compare it to how much other distribution channels take off the top. I'm sure if there is more competition then you'll see that 30% get shaved but right now 30% is pretty darn nice for what you get.
I disagree that it's a free market (Score:4, Insightful)
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen.
An oligopoly isn't especially a free market. Microsoft has announced that it will require OEMs of devices running Windows 8 for ARM to configure UEFI such that it won't boot anything but Windows 8.
That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down.
This almost happened with the SSSCA/CBDTPA proposal [wikipedia.org]. It's also starting to happen with a patent land grab on the part of companies opposed to free computing, namely Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft in particular rakes in royalties for Android equal to those for Windows Phone 7.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand.
Take this scenario for example: A locked computer costs $200, and an unlocked computer costs $2,000, and you have to be an established business with a secure office to qualify to buy an unlocked computer (source: warioworld.com among others). To what extent will the market demand unlocked computers under such conditions?
One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one!
But will it stay sub $50, or will the price shoot up as they run out of stock and people start reselling them for a 300% premium or more on eBay, like a recently launched game console?
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Collude to take away freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NVIDIA (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe is how application resources are bundled. But fat binaries are a different thing. They are a single executable file that contains code for multiple instruction sets. Same for both command line tools and Applications.