Emmanuel Dreyfus recently noted that progress has been made with NetBSD's Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer. Specifically, "WindowServer is able to talk with mach_init and it runs for quite a long time before crashing. Next steps are to fix the emulation bugs that cause WindowServer to crash, and then to re-implement enough of Darwin's IOKit to get WindowServer actually displaying something." (WindowServer being MacOS X's equivalent of an X server.)

According to the project's home page, "Once we will have a fully functionnal Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc (if that happens some day), we will just have to grab MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes." Learn more about binary emulation with NetBSD here.

From: Emmanuel Dreyfus
To: tech-kern, port-macppc
Subject: MacOS X binary compatibility status
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 16:20:44 +0100

Hi folks

One step forward on the road to MacOS X emulation: WindowServer (The
MacoS X equivalent of the X server) is now able to talk with mach_init,
which works as a name server for Mach tasks. it crashes later, but at
least we are getting some Mach IPC working.

To avoid copy/pasting the information each time, I made a status page on
the web with some FAQ and their answers
http://hcpnet.free.fr/applebsd.html

And the usual message: this subproject is bottomless. Feel free to help.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus

• Google Archive Of Above Thread (And more - worth reading if curious)
• Emmanuel Dreyfus Interview (O'Reilly ONLamp)
• Slashdot Discussion
• NetBSD Documentation: Binary Emulation in NetBSD
• DaemonNews: Getting into NetBSD - How to Help