Ars Report - x86 on a white box

[scruffy]

Originally Posted by Viro

Not necessarily since not everything that is in OS X appears in Darwin, most notably the various closed source drivers. I have no reason to believe that the part of the OS that communicates with the DRM hardware will be made available to the general public through Darwin.

It's not necessary to have access to the source of the software that interacts with the the DRM hardware, to write a fake implementation. All you have to do is check what system calls it exposes, and implement dummy calls of the same name that always return "yes, you are running on a legit mactel" answers.

The important part about Darwin being open source is that anyone can write a kernel extension for it. That kernel extension can expose the same API as a hypothetical closed-source one that ships with OS X, no problem.

[RGrphc2]

has anybody seen these articles...OS X is being leaked and can be run on any x86 PC

a part of me wants to find OSx86 and install in on my dell, but then i remember it's still in Beta and i remember its illegal too...

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000070054245/

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/e...tel-117089.php

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/08/...n.sony.laptop/

http://wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,685...w=wn_tophead_1

http://www.uneasysilence.com/os-x-pr...n-ordinary-pc/

[jh2112]

Here's a howto...

http://www.360hacker.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1108

[Reality]

And here is a screen.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y173/ovejon/osX86.jpg

I love Apple hardware, I truly do but I also kinda like the appeal of having a PC/Mac all in one. I could play PC games, but still use my favorite OS. Not to mention have all the fun of viruses for Windows to deal with.

[Viro]

Originally Posted by scruffy

It's not necessary to have access to the source of the software that interacts with the the DRM hardware, to write a fake implementation. All you have to do is check what system calls it exposes, and implement dummy calls of the same name that always return "yes, you are running on a legit mactel" answers.

The important part about Darwin being open source is that anyone can write a kernel extension for it. That kernel extension can expose the same API as a hypothetical closed-source one that ships with OS X, no problem.

You could do that, try to reverse engineer the drivers. But it isn't always an easy task, especially if Apple wants to make it difficult for people to reverse engineer. Many have been trying to reverse engineer the nVidia, ATI and Broadcom drivers for a while now, with no success. Same goes for the iSight, *book's soft modem, and loads of other devices that don't work well with Linux.

Then again, getting OS X to run on generic hardware might be far more sexy and exciting than doing drivers for any of the above, so we may get even more brilliant hackers working on it

[fryke]

Well, one could get hardware that _is_ supported. On the other hand, why not just wait until there's a Mac mini with intel processor. I guess I'll do just that, then.