Two years of research culminated in a breakthrough for the OSX86 project when hacker netkas successfully produced a way to boot an unmodified kernel of OS X on a PC. The installation uses a special version of Darwin to boot the original kernel and has multiboot and FSB detection. Most recent Pentium processors (Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Core Solo, Pentium D, Pentium 4) are supported. This breakthrough will allow Hackintosh computers to utilize direct updates from Apple instead of relying upon cracked updates of OS X. In the coming month, it is likely that a Leopard DVD designed for PCs which utilizes the modified bootloader will appear allowing many hackintoshes to function nearly identical to Apple Macintoshes. It is unclear what effect this might have upon Apple’s future proprietary hardware protection schemes.
November 13, 2007...9:51 pm
OS X86 Team runs OS X on Apple’s Kernel
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6 Comments
November 13, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Got any links to the nitty gritty? Bootloaders just kick off an OS… I’m guessing there’s some sort of emulation involved.
November 14, 2007 at 12:20 am
It’s being discussed in this thread:
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=70943
Netkas’s blog post:
http://netkas.freeflux.net/
For nitty gritty, see:
http://tgwbd.org/darwin/boot.html
November 15, 2007 at 3:28 am
Cool.. haven’t had a chance to read too much but it sounds like they are emulating a mac bios….(?)
November 15, 2007 at 5:02 am
Basically. I don’t understand all of the technical EFI stuff very well. This isn’t full compatibility, but it’s a big step. The hack has been released and a number of people are using it. I haven’t seen it in action, but I guess there are some hardware problems that get introduced by using the mac kernel such as a hang on shutdown and reboot. Of course, these things will probably be fixed with kernel extensions outside of the mach_kernel. All this stuff is kind of new so there’s not a whole lot being written about it yet. I tried submitting the story to digg, but you kinda need a bunch of people to bump your story to get it started. I expect it to hit the front page when a decent install disc comes out. Could be another month. A fully-featured Leopard hackintosh disc still hasn’t come out.
November 15, 2007 at 5:34 am
A girl in my class the other day had Leopard. She asked me if I had it yet, and I had to say, “Nope. Not yet.” I had fun messing around with it, but the stacks feature really sucked. I was pretty impressed by the quick look feature. Anyway, the hackintosh stuff sounds pretty cool.
November 16, 2007 at 4:05 pm
For the stacks feature, this guy figured out an awesome fix:
http://optica-optima.blogspot.com/2007/11/drawers-icon-2.html
What? You don’t read Japanese you say? Okay, here’s a good English link:
http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860
Basically it puts your stacks in a bin so it’s easier to tell what they are. I haven’t tried it yet but it was news a few days ago in the Leopard nerd world.