Darbat, the L4/Darwin port, has just had its second public release. Darbat Release 0.2 boots natively on Apple Intel EFI hardware and offers binary compatibility with Intel OS X applications and IOKit device drivers. Simple Darbat system call performance is comparable with that of Mac OS X 10.4.6. You can download the source or a binary distribution to boot a simple demo on hardware. The release notes contain an overview of the Darbat design and implementation.
Pretty cool, only complaint I have is why do they feel is nesessary to put the release notes in .PDF format? Why not HTML?
…take the EFI boot code and make use of it? I know it is a different kernel, but I would imagine the bulk of the code is more-or-less generic and could be molded to fit the BSD kernels? I would love to see FreeBSD/NetBSD boot natively and easily on my mini core duo. That and getting airport extreme to work.
They say that the system call performance is on par with mac os x but… wouldn’t part of the reason for doing this be to resolve some of the lock issues that have been recorded (ars technica I think it was) for server-based applications?
Ah well, very cool anyway!
To boot Darbat you need an Intel Mac machine to boot on, called the victim.
Sign me up!
take a mac-mini, refund back OSX and run darwin on L4 because it has all the apps I need. Neither Apple looses, nor I. Apple can make a distribution of Darbat ( Darwin on L4) like Novell, for x86 architecture, AMD/Intel/Via. It is not a problem to run Darbat with nice OpenDarwin apps on an Apple Celeron-D. I think it is a win-win for Apple.
…and offers binary compatibility with Intel OS X applications…
is wrong !!! At least I would understand this as I can run all OS-X applications, like photo shop, office etc. 😉
correct is:
Most text-mode binary applications off an Intel Mac will run.
Please, add a (warning:PDF) note next to the release notes link, or something to that effect.