Re: Port to PowerPC

[Patrick Strasser]

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> 
>    Date: Sat, 8 Jul 00 19:59:25 +0100
>    From: Peter Bruin <pjbruin@dds.nl>
> 
>    Hello,
> 
>    I would like to work on a port of the Hurd to the PowerPC, using OSF
>    Mach. I have already cross-compiled (= hacked) most of the GNU C library
>    and the Hurd; serverboot works (from the MkLinux prompt) until it tries
>    to load ext2fs.static (which I haven't done yet). Does anybody have
>    comments on this, and is there anything I should do before continuing?
> 
> OSF Mach is a bit different from GNU Mach.  The set of RPC's is
> slightly different and I believe that the OSF MiG is slightly
> different from the traditional MiG used on GNU Mach.  I don't know if
> you can use the GNU MiG at all (perhaps you can use oit for the Hurd's
> *.defs files), but if you use the OSF MiG you'll probably need to hack
> the Hurd *.defs files somewhat.  You'll also have to adjust some hand
> crafted Mach messages that are hidden in the Hurd and libc.
> 
> If you have some concrete questions, don't hesitate to ask.  I'd love
> to see the Hurd running alongside with Mac OS X :-).
> 
> Mark

Hallo,

I have a question...

I read some people want to run the Hurd on typical apple hardware as PPC
and the like, so I took a look at Apples Darwin resources and I'm trying
to get at least the partitionimages from www.darwinfo.org running.

First I tried to load the Kernelimage partition with Grub, but i didn't
get far. In fact I didn't expect it to work.
Darwin uses the Mach-O (Mach Object) binary format, which handles
multiple achitectures in a single binary. At the moment only Darwin
compiles to Mach-O. Some people talked about building a
crosscompile-tool-chain, but I haven't seen anything usable until now.

Darwin uses some parts from the NeXT system, like the UFS-format, in
NeXT flavour of course. It's pretty similar to *BSD UFS formats, just
differing in the first 8 kb. 
Has anyone ever tried to mount a Darwin partition (code a8, UFS is at
the a* range of partition type signatures)? I don't expect it to be a
big challenge to get Darwin ufs working in Hurd and vice versa.

Now my question: Do all binaries, kernel and severs, have to be the same
format (ELF, a.out, Mach-O). Is there a chance to compile Hurd servers
to Mach-O?
If not I would say it's nearly impossible to get Hurd runnning on
something like Darwin.

Patrick