Progress on the pi3 port of Darwin continues. Libc, pthread , libdispatch are built. User accounts properly work. While dylib isn't ready yet but statically linked simple utilities now run off of the SD card.
Lots left to do still such as dyld, libc and lib dispatch, but still making steady progress on Darwin running on raspberry pi 3. We have a single user shell launched off of the SD card and bunch of commands (basically busy box) . I hope to replace all of this with proper commands in the final release. That is dependent on the library work above. Having a functional true file system, proper user system and logins is a good milestone.
Next up, dyld, libc etc. Will need to add USB support before I get there ethernet kext working. Having all of that should unlock a lot of functionality (hopefully, macports)
Linux is a fantastic os for servers and can scale up from embedded devices to massive servers. Linux and xnu are optimized around different engineering goals. Assuming equal driver support, xnu is designed to prioritize low jitter, deadline driven determinism in human perceptible tasks like audio latency and UIs. xnus scheduler and IPC design offer distinct advantages in frame pacing, audio latency, and UI responsiveness under heavy system load.
I’ve been experimenting with running Darwin on rpi3. Realistically this is a toy project to serve as a proof of concept. On a rpi5 however, without the bandwidth, memory limitations and unified memory, Darwin will be able to shine.
My current project is to boot xnu and design a minimal xnu based os to operate on a raspberry pi. What we now have custom version of u-boot and xnu that boot on Raspberry pi 3 as well as a version of qemu emulating Raspberry Pi 3 that is able to launch Xnu. Kernel now boots to a stable state (no panic) with a valid device tree for this hardware.
Currently working on writing IOkit based kexts for at the very least the SD card reader and an interrupt handlers so i can bring up process 1. Launchd has not had an open source release in a while so we will likely take a lot of things from freebsd
A lot of people seem to think PureDarwin has stalled.
It hasn't. Development just moved to the `next` branch while we work towards something actually releasable.
github.com/PureDarwin/PureDrawin//next
You can find old branches at PureDarwin-archive
For reference, both Ferdinand Klinzer (hideout) and Tyson Key (vmlemon) are aware and in the loop, I constantly consult them on feedback.
Current disk images can be found in the Discord server (unsure if I am allowed to post outside links besides known sources)
It's still not reliable enough to call a release, but I actively work on it pretty much every day.
Since then we've gained:
Oh and of course, we have DOOM. This was just the more polished demo
Development updates is constantly posted to the Discord channel.
TL;DR PureDarwin isn't dead. It's just been spending a lot of time in the "doing the unglamorous infrastructure work before calling it a release" phase.
Read some more information from another post in the r/FreeBSD subreddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1vgj63g/puredarwin_contains_freebsd_code_now_can_run_xfce
