This kind of architecture independence is an idea that's been kicked around in a variety of contexts, with different pros and cons, but this seems like it could be a promising one, with Darwin/Intel bringing it to the "almost-there" level, and the lure of Mac OS X running on x86 boxes. If this is really true, and the CPU is the only reason (i.e., the other differences between the platforms are not too big to be abstracted beneath the Darwin layer), then would it be theoretically possible to hack a PowerPC emulation engine into Darwin/Intel, such that all the higher level code could be run through the emulator? I'm talking about integrating it at the kernel level, so that PPC binaries could be run in a "wrapper process" that would pass their code through the emulator, translate their API calls to the appropriate format before passing them to the kernel, etc.
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel because the available binary code is PPC code. I guess you, and the page you linked to, are saying that it's the latter, which is really good news, and which I've only doubted out of general cynicism. * "the abstraction really is complete, so that with the right hardware-enabling kernel extensions (which anyone can do, since the kernel is open-source), you can literally run unmodified Apple binaries and third-party applications". * "because the dependencies are minimized, it would be very easy for Apple, if they so chose, (has to be them, since the higher layers are not open-source) to modify the code to enable the higher layers to run", and I've been wondering just how true this is - I understand that this is the architectural idea, but the truth could have been anywhere between: So Aqua cannot "know" if the motherboard is genuine Apple or not. My Power Mac G5 has been modified from its stock state with a 120GB OWC Mercury 3G solid state drive, a 1.5 TB Western Digital drive, 10 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 7800GT video card.Only the Darwin layer interacts with the hardware, all the other layers interact with the Darwin kernel (that's one point of having a kernel). Welcome to G5Center, a space to exploring tips, ideas, and resources to get the most out of our ancient Power Mac G5s.
0 kommentar(er)
