Hi, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> From what I understand the darwin kernel is not compatable with the > mach interface though. The Darwin kernel doesn't have Mach's device drivers; instead, it uses Apple's so-called IOKit. As far as I know, the rest of the Mach system calls should work, at least if they haven't been disabled. The Mach calls are not actually used in Darwin; it seems to be there just for VM, scheduling and SMP purposes. > My question is: would it be possible to use the darwin kernel as a > starting point for getting the hurd to run on more recent ppc > hardware, and, if so does anyone have any desire to help with this > project, or at least provide any helpful pointers to a newbie in the > kernel programming area? José Marchesi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is porting the OSKit and GNUMach to the PowerPC (see http://es.gnu.org/~jemarch/ppc-oskit/). You might want to help with that, since there are two problems with Darwin: the lack of Mach devices (see above), and the license under which it is published (the Apple Public Source License). This license is not compatible with the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html). I suppose you could solve both problems (implementing Mach devices without having to modify Darwin) only by implementing a kind of `device server', a standalone program which translates Mach device requests into IOKit calls. From a practical point of view, this would probably be the easiest way of getting the Hurd to run on newer PPC machines, and you also have the possibility of running the Hurd together with Mac OS. The drawback is that you depend on non-free software, however, but on the other hand that won't really be a problem when GNUMach will also be available. > Thanks in advance. > Kyle Hope this helps. Thanks, Peter _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
