MOL for Mac OS X

[Samuel Rydh]

Charles,

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 10:43:46AM +0000, Charles Warwick wrote:
>
> With regards to your comments on OS X, and my quick scan of your 
> MOL source code, I assume that the boot loader for OS X is 
> complete and functional (Since you were able to boot the public
> beta version, and the appearance of the boot loader code in MOL) ?

Well, it is pretty much complete. It was modelled on the version
of the bootloader Apple released half a year after the public beta.
Possibly, there have been changes. I'm not sure, but I think
Apple's current bootloader looks for drivers on the boot disk and
loads them using Open Firmware. The public beta had most of
the drivers directly compiled into the kernel but that is no longer
true.

> This means that, as you said, it is primarily a question of writing
> the native OS X drivers... are you able to provide me with a copy
> of the OS X drivers you have written, and any issues that you believe
> currently exist with them?

Certainly. I'll e-mail you a copy later today. When I get
the time, I'll also put the code into a BitKeeper repository
(after some cleanup).

> Given what you said about the public beta version of Mac OS X, 
> would it be your guess that the video drivers were causing the
> login box to fail to appear?

Possibly. It might also be due to missing VBL interrupts (there
is no interrupt controller yet). The startup progress box
does work though.

Btw. I did an optimization to the MOL MMU layer some time
ago which I later found caused the Darwin kernel to panic
in the early boot stage. Examining this condition has been
on my to-do list for quite some time.

> I should be able to get access to an OS X machine, and am in the 
> process of getting that sorted out.
Great.


Cheers,

/Samuel