"Today, we're making the first source code of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community. There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation. We wanted to start the conversation with working code. So we have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0."
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Member since:2005-07-06
True. But it still *is* running on Apple hardware, even if it's not dom0. I don't know how they enforce booting only on Apple hardware but there is virtualised access to the TPM under Xen, if necessary, so there may be some way of legitimately proving to the MacOS that it really is running on the right hardware, instead of just hacking it to work.
It'll be interesting to see what Apple do with their Darwin EFI code: it used to be possible to recompile Darwin from the Open Source components and use that to boot MacOS X on a Mac. If you could do that on x86 it'd make this whole process much simpler.
Re. porting or not, fully virtualising is a pain, and you'd want to avoid that - particularly if you want pretty graphics from your Mac. We don't have code to pass a PCI device to a non-Xen aware guest, although I think VT has some provisions for doing so in principle.
Member since:2005-11-17
Its exactly because I do want the pretty graphics etc from MacOS X that I want it to be dom0 rather than domU. For Solaris, *BSD, *Linux running in domU's my graphics needs aren't much above a terminal window and an email client.
It would be nice if MacOS X could be dom0 but as you said unmodified dom0 is really hard and I can't see the motivation from Apple to do this given the agreements with Microsoft on Virtual PC. But I can wish, its my birthday soon :-)
Cheers.
Member since:
2005-11-17
The reason for wanting MacOS X Intel as dom0 is because Apple has stated that they will not support running of MacOS X on anything but Apple hardware. I believe they will do quite a lot to enforce this - sure people will hack around it but thats not my interest. Getting Darwin/Xen up is one thing but it is quite a step away from having MacOS X up. For one thing Darwin still depends on PC BIOS but MacOS X Intel boots from EFI (without PC BIOS legacy support).