a prealpha for a 2021 project i might run far away from this and start my own which i also dont release
RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
131–140 of 148 posts
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#132I'm sort of surprised that development is still on X86 instead of moving over to ARM, it looks like the only builds for ARM are for raspberry pi - I know about Asahi but I would have thought that these darwin-based projects would have a leg up on booting even the latest hardware, is Apple not updating darwin anymore?
Kernel dev here (my own project): ARM is great. Love it. There are tons of chips that all do things differently, much more so than x86. Plus the booting mechanisms are a PITA to figure out, debugging is tricky, etc - and that's a single target. x86 isn't particularly elegant given its years of cruft and questionable design decisions but at least it's quasi-consistent (yes, lots of "well actually" possible; I'm speaki…
Right, I probably should have said "Apple Silicon" specifically. The m1 launched in 2020, the last intel mac was released in 2023.
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most kernels are kind of the same really. Some have slightly fancier inter-process communication. Leading to my all-time favorite YouTube video, an explainer on Android IPC cut like a spy thriller. I'm not even joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb4UoqXPEtI
Er, uhm… I have to disagree really. You have monolithic kernels versus micro kernels, I’ve used weird stuff such as DragonFlyBSD, Plan9, and BeOS. Even the Windows NT kernel (now mainline Windows) is a very unusual piece of software engineering.
I guess that depends on where you draw the line at "kernel" and what you consider "unusual".
I study kernels for fun, so I've had a lot of opinions like that over the years, but none survived gaining more experience. For example, I used to think that the Windows NT kernel was a microkernel, then I thought that it was a hybrid, but now I know that it's actually monolithic. Likewise, I now understand that the major differences between the FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD kernel are really just a few hundred lines of code, nothing major. But if you Google it, it'll make it sound like they're worlds apart.
Part of this is understanding that what people call "the kernel" usually includes a lot of things that, arguably shouldn't be considered part of the kernel proper. And a lot of the differences people cite between kernels come down to different message-passing architectures that are extremely interesting academically, but don't show up in real-world testing.
The sad part is, you can't reach this level of understanding though normal means, every source of information is full of half-truths. You have to dig into the source code and run these things on a bench yourself.
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#134Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?
XNU has some interesting features. It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS. It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model. Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF. Nothing really earth-shatter…
Is it possible to write device drivers for Ravynos with Driver kit?
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The screenshots were deleted a month ago. https://github.com/ravynsoft/website/commit/1a576c1d8f2fa964...
Also if you wanna GUI puredarwin exist , based on X11 no macOS GUI subsystem: - https://sourceforge.net/projects/puredarwin/files/2012/ older - https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin/releases/tag/17.4 older just before new Nix - https://www.puredarwin.org/#get-it newest using X11 and Nix packager
Maybe it will take off with AI
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#136Seems at least one of the same developers works on both PureDarwin and ravynOS: https://www.puredarwin.org/news/The-Road-to-20-5-0.html (This is the first time I've heard of the latter.)
Good. Unfortunately Hackintosh people never put weight behind Pure Darwin. A missed opportunity.
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#137Maybe someone more familiar with operating systems kernels can answer this: Is Darwin really all the exiting? It is different from both the BSD kernels and Linux, but less so than Windows. Other than the ability to run macOS applications (assuming you can clone the libraries and APIs from macOS) is there some benefit of Darwin that I'm not seeing?
Just to clarify, did you mean ‘exciting’ by
> Is Darwin really all the exiting?
I’ve tried to reread your question, and couldn’t get the sense, before I thought maybe that’s an autocorrection / misprint.
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#138I think any desktop operating systems has to present itself with at least a single screenshot. Why not one in the entire page?
My bet is that is heavily vibe coded abandonware.
I’m super excited about any open source OS there is, but in all honesty, I see very little value for a desktop system like that. Linux is plenty good and apps ecosystem is slowly coming into a really great state. I’d love to see FreeBSD being there too, and basically you need nothing different from that.
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF. I've always admired that mach-o supports fat binaries.
It's more that Darwin does. A fat binary is just two independent Mach-O binaries concatenated with a small header.
Maybe, but ELF doesn't support doing so
Re: RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more that Darwin does. A fat binary is just two independent Mach-O binaries concatenated with a small header.
Maybe, but ELF doesn't support doing so
One might be interested in the not-very-alive FatELF implementation, though: https://icculus.org/fatelf/