Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

#21

Post by hal_____ » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:32 AM UTC

Why is this flagged?

Re: Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

#22

Post by doener » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:50 AM UTC

Why is this flagged?

Re: Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

#23

Post by unkown-unknowns » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

This should not be flagged. The title is correct. There is code specific to arm and arm64 in the repo, whereas previously the public source code releases were only i386 and amd64. Apple has open sourced the iOS kernel. Please unflag.

Re: Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

#24

Post by hk__2 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #10

If they start taking PR's and merging in, that would be awesome. I'm sure there's lots to be optimized and improved.

> If they start taking PR's

It’s a mirror.

Re: Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

#25

Post by cucumberferity » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

ngcc_hk wrote: post #18

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #8

XNU has always been open source, but not the iOS specific changes. There have been private efforts to compile it for ARM, but this is now officially supported in the public Apple source code.

But is this compilable and usable for a bare iron iphone or mac? Or even vm?

Not in it's current state. It's just a kernel. It's missing key components of the software stack to even make it terminal-only, let alone a GUI. There have been attempts through the years to create a full OS from the bits of OS X/macOS that Apple drops on opensource.apple.com. They do this by surrounding the kernel with FreeBSD or GNU software land, porting Xorg, and other components. See DarwinBSD, OpenDarwin, and PureDarwin. None of the projects proved sustainable in the long-run. It is possible that could change now though with better access to the code on GitHub. It's also possible we could see better drivers developed for hackintosh.