Subject: Re: mac-on-darwin?
From: Samuel Rydh (samuel@ibrium.se)
Date: Wed Apr 25 2001 - 15:15:28 MDT
On Mon, Apr 23, 2001 at 06:25:31PM -0700, Terry Lynch wrote:
> > I wonder if there is any effort made or drive towards making a
> > "mac-on-darwin" extension? (Sorry, I'm sure there is another word for
> > "extension" in the linux world...) I got that impression that from
> > one of your latest posts, Samuel, that there might be such a future?
>
> I am very interested in "mac-on-darwin," and I am willing to contribute what
> I can in the porting effort. I have done some c work, but I don't know much
> about MOL. Does anyone know actually what it would take to port MOL over to
> darwin? Just a brief summary would be wonderful and perhaps an estimate of
> what percentage of code would have to be changed.
>
> Terry
>
Actually, I've thought about porting MOL to *BSD and
to Darwin. The non-trivial part is porting the kernel module -
the rest should be more or less routine.
Most of the Linux-dependent code is page table realted.
Linux uses the PTE hash as a cache, while Darwin (and possibly
*BSD) uses a more complicated model with cast-out lists.
It is also necessary to find a way to detect swap-outs
(MOL hooks a Linux function for this).
I think the number of lines needed is quite limited. The difficulty
is more technical (assembly skills and detailed knowledge
about memory management and the MMU is probably what it takes).
A good starting point is understanding the code in mol/kernel_module/.
As for the usefulness of running MOL under Darwin/OSX... it would
be nice to be able to run linux under Darwin.
/Samuel
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