I would like to tell everyone about my new research project. Its goal is to attempt to run MacOS X on the Pegasos natively.
Currently i've started building Pegasos version of BootX bootloader. If there is anyone who wishes to help i'd like to know. I can set up a CVS and we could co-operate.

Sonic

Well it sounds like a fun idea, but many people have looked at this already and it doesnt seem feasibly possible iirc.

magnetic

I'd rather run OSX binaries on Linux with something like osxwine ;)
Maybe you could do more research about this instead of running OSX natively.
Not sure how you would get the osx API and cocoa to run on it though.
But hey, they managed to run Windows apps with wine, so why wouldn't it be able to do the same with osx apps.

well, I am no Pegasos user, but I am Mac user, who is deciding to make switch the right way and I must say that native MacOS X with accelerated GUI would be for sure great ! i think that this is what can make many nowadays Mac users, who are not happy with that Intel thing, go and use Pegasos.

Let me think a bit. The Kernel of MacOS X is available as OpenSource-Project Darwin. So wouldnt it be possible to make Darwin bootable on Pegasos and then change the Kernel from within MacOS somehow?

I think it is a very interesting question. I think it could be done like the unoffical runs-on-every-pc version of OSX on x86.

Well if Sonic starts to take care of it maybe it would be possible, worth trying in my opinion, MOL is not very good in terms of speed and a native OSX with OpenGL support would be such an amazing thing. I wish i could help, but i have no coding skills,. But i'm very excited about it.

Well, i agree this currently doesn't have 100% to succeed, but anyway it's really an interesting task. There are several things which say that it's probably possible (currently i think chances are ~75-80%):
1. There is a project called XPostFacto aimed at running OS X on earlier Mac models, officially unsupported by Apple. The project consists of modified BootX loader and a set of kexts (kernel extensions = hardware drivers) which are put into the system in addition to supplied ones. I see an end result of my project to be something like this.
2. I've studied the source code of xnu kernel. There's nothing inside which really prevents it from booting on non-Mac system except one check for "mac-io" device presence in the OpenFirmware tree. However, this check has a hole and can be bypassed. :wink: This means OS X kernel can run without being recompiled. As to recompiling the kernel, well, i beleive Apple's programmers are not so stupid and they've excluded some parts from opensource version of the kernel.

It's possible. I can say this right now, but do you imagine how huge this work can be? This means you'll need to write Linux-hosted version of those APIs from scratch (the same as with Wine). It's damn tons of work, the result would be in a permanent alpha state and unusable (again, the same as with Wine). I've played with Wine a bit and i know what i say here. Almost none of apps really work.

@sonic : go go go !
We are with you ;-)

Sonic, go for MacOS X natively. It would be great to run X on the new onnounced Amiga PWRficient box!

X runs on nearly every x86 machine, why not on PPC ;-)
Maybe some of the OSx86 hackers can give you a hint?

I'm sure if this works, Genesi and Amiga will see a boost in sales :-)