Re: Port to PowerPC

[Patrick Strasser]

Mark Kettenis wrote:
> 
>    Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:36:33 +0100
>    From: Patrick Strasser <pstrasser@gmx.net>
>    X-Sender: "Patrick Strasser" <2997134000@email.aon.at>
>    X-Accept-Language: de-AT,de
>    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
>    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.
> 
> Getting Darwin up and running is certainly essential if you want to
> make any progress.
> 

Ok, Darwin runs, Partitionimage is mountable in Linux with 'mount -t ufs
-o ufstype=44bsd <dev> <mountpt>'

>    First I tried to load the Kernelimage partition with Grub, but i didn't
>    get far. In fact I didn't expect it t 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
>    crosscompilt-tool-chain, but I haven't seen anything usable until now.
> 
> I think it should be possible to build a cross-tool-chain for a
> generic PowerPC ELF target (powerpc-elf), or PowerPC Linux target
> (powerpc-linux) without too much hassle on Darwin.  That should be
> enough to start hacking on the Hurd and the GNU C Library.

I forgot to mention that the images I took from www.darwinfo.org are for
Intelm hwat I should have. They have restrictions, as they only support
Intel PIIX4 Chipset (440 BX and such). 

> The only problems are related to writing the PowerPC specific hurd
> code in the C library (the rest of the PowerPC specific code could be
> identical to the Linux PowerPC code), and the differences between
> GNUMach and the version of Mach used by Apple.  Some of the interfaces
> have been changed, I believe the MiG protocols have been changed, and
> Apple replaced the old Mach device interface with the IOkit.

With Darwin on Intel work on Darwin and work on PPC could be separated.

The Apple Public Source License applying to Darwin could be a problem.
I'm not native English and not an expert for Licences, so if anybody is
skilled, feel free to comment.

Patrick