Re: Port to PowerPC

[Peter Bruin]

>Hallo,
>
>I have a question...
>
>I read some people want to run the Hurd on typical apple hardware as PPC
>and the like, so I took a look at Apples Darwin resources and I'm trying
>to get at least the partitionimages from www.darwinfo.org running.
>
>First I tried to load the Kernelimage partition with Grub, but i didn't
>get far. In fact I didn't expect it to work.
>Darwin uses the Mach-O (Mach Object) binary format, which handles
>multiple achitectures in a single binary. At the moment only Darwin
>compiles to Mach-O. Some people talked about building a
>crosscompile-tool-chain, but I haven't seen anything usable until now.
>
>Darwin uses some parts from the NeXT system, like the UFS-format, in
>NeXT flavour of course. It's pretty similar to *BSD UFS formats, just
>differing in the first 8 kb. 
>Has anyone ever tried to mount a Darwin partition (code a8, UFS is at
>the a* range of partition type signatures)? I don't expect it to be a
>big challenge to get Darwin ufs working in Hurd and vice versa.
>
>Now my question: Do all binaries, kernel and severs, have to be the same
>format (ELF, a.out, Mach-O). Is there a chance to compile Hurd servers
>to Mach-O?
>If not I would say it's nearly impossible to get Hurd runnning on
>something like Darwin.
>
>Patrick

Hello,

The servers don't have to be Mach-O, because only serverboot is loaded by 
Darwin; the other servers are loaded by serverboot. The easiest is 
probably to make serverboot a Mach-O binary and the Hurd servers ELF. I 
don't think Darwin has a Mach library, so that will need to be ported 
(from GNU libc?) to compile serverboot.

Peter