PureDarwin – An Informal Successor to OpenDarwin

PureDarwin – An Informal Successor to OpenDarwin(github.com)

105 points by cookrn 10 years ago | 36 comments

soneil 10 years ago |

Other than moving it to github, is there actually anything new here? They're still talking about the xmas release (2008), and of targeting Darwin9 (2007) and Darwin10(2009).

jgranby 10 years ago | |

Exactly -- the latest major release is Darwin 15 (corresponding to OS X El Capitan / 10.11). I'd love to see this (or a similar) project succeed and remain relevant, but it just seems to be falling further and further behind the official releases.

(To be clear, I know there are good reasons for this, and I'm not trying to imply that a lot of work hasn't gone into what has been released ... but I can't help but wonder if there's no longer any hope of it catching up with (semi-closed) Darwin.)

xufi 10 years ago | |

That's a good point. I was about to point it out too. A bit behind if you're already 5-8 versions behind

DigitalJack 10 years ago |

I fully appreciate the "doing it for the fun of it" mentality. Am I wrong in assuming that is the "why" behind this project?

I have used OS X full time for 7 years now, and I love it, but I never thought the kernel had much to recommend it.

mdaniel 10 years ago | |

My interest in having a running Darwin system is the ability to build OSX things on an openly licensed platform. I know that it is permissible to virtualize OSX on top of OSX, but even that is a PITA and more so in a TeamCity/jenkins/etc setup

Giving what the mingw project has contributed to being able to build Windows binaries on Linux, I'm pretty sure it would be possible to do something similar for OSX, but since so much of it is already open source, it seems a waste to discard the exact code that OSX is running

lloeki 10 years ago |

This is something I've been waiting for. After years of standby I've been working on Arch OS X again lately (fully operational but currently waiting for trademark approval from the Arch Linux team) and Arch Darwin is something I was contemplating to do for fun at some unspecified timeframe in the future.

mrweasel 10 years ago | |

If you don't mind me asking: Other than intellectual curiosity, why would you want to run Darwin, and not just one of the BSDs? Aren't a large number of the drivers still closed source?

lloeki 10 years ago | | |

The kext mechanism is pragmatic and interesting: as opposed to Linux kernel modules, binary kexts are compatible across whole kernel versions.

Also, having alternatives is always interesting. I was also interested in making the core of OS X† have some form of FOSS liveliness, but I've been quite disheartened about OS X and openness (however limited) since this[0] happened.

[0]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller/issues/2

† I do believe that FOSS is very important, but I also recognise the critical effect of closed source innovations, and believe that a delicate balance and synergy between both aspects can produce fantastic results.

orionblastar 10 years ago |

Darwin was cool until Apple quit releasing ISO files and just the source code that needed a lot of work to debug it and put it back together.

I'm glad to see someone took it over and has a goal of making Darwin ISO files. I hope it also gets an OSX themed skin for whatever Desktop GUI they decide to use with Cario Dock or something to look like OSX.

pjmlp 10 years ago | |

Without the whole Objective-C/Swift userspace libraries it will just look like OS X, but it won't be OS X.

derefr 10 years ago | | |

Wow, it isn't built on Objective-C? That's completely the reverse of my expectations. I'd picture an "Open Darwin" as a ground-up FOSS rewrite of Mach + XPC, followed by XNU + IOKit, followed by libobjc and CoreFoundation (and libdispatch), followed by most of Cocoa, then all the stuff like LaunchServices to rotate the userland around to an app-bundle-based perspective... and and then maybe getting to the Aqua stuff, sometime around when HURD is usable. You know, basically like the order Mono occurred in.

More to the point, I'd expect the first-milestone goal of an "OpenDarwin" project would be to be able to install and run OSX's Server.app and act as an OpenDirectory master, NetBoot Restore manager, etc. That proves compatibility, and is a useful thing all on its own (because, among other things, it would mean being able to manage OSX from non-Apple hardware†.) Doing a GUI first? Crazy talk!

† ...without spending weeks tearing your hair out trying to conform a Linux LDAP+Kerberos+whatever server to OSX's idea of what an OpenDirectory controller is supposed to look like. I tried, I tried so hard...

xvilka 10 years ago | | |

I remember there was a crowdfunding campaign or so, about reimplementing this runtime (including graphics libraries) using opensource ObjC implementations.

fithisux 10 years ago | | |

KDE is better than Aqua. One needs Darwin for drivers and other subsystems. You can even run cocotron on this.