Porting Mac OS X to Intel

Porting Mac OS X to Intel: "How hard can it be? The actual operating system will be a piece of cake; it's all those applications and device drivers that will prove troublesome.


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In the hubbub over Apple's anticipated move from IBM to Intel chips, much has been said about how difficult the move would be. But really, how hard can it be to port Mac OS X to the Intel platform when its core operating system already runs on x86 chips?

Mac OS X's foundation is the open-source Darwin operating system. This, in turn, is built on the Mach 3.0 kernel. And, underneath Mach, you'll find the BSD 4.4 (Berkeley Software Distribution) Unix. In particular, Darwin owes a debt of gratitude to the FreeBSD distribution.

While Apple's own Darwin crew have focused primarily on the PowerPC platform, they've already done some work with Darwin on Intel. In addition, some open-source programs, like the Apache Web server and Sendmail, are available on Darwin.

'Much of Darwin is processor-independent BSD code,' according to the Darwin developer Web site."