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Binary drivers

Hi,

A couple of weeks ago on darwin-kernel I asked this but I'm going to ask again here and hope that I get a response.

Is there any chance that the binary drivers that used to be included with Darwin 8 can be licensed again for Darwin 9? As I'm sure you're aware, OSObject was changed on x86 to have only 16 reserved vtable slots instead of 32 as had traditionally been used (and is still used for ABI compatibility on PPC).

That means that Darwin is unusable on x86, even on a real Mac unless you want to buy an additional OS X license to run Darwin. Why an OS X license? Because that's the only license I'm able to find which covers the binary-only driver components. This situation is absolutely ridiculous.

It would be really convenient for cross-platform projects (such as wxWidgets) if there was an available Darwin 9 binary release that non- Mac developers could use to at least make sure the mac ports build. I am not asking Apple to spin a new Darwin release as I can take care of this myself.

What I am doing is politely requesting that the previous status quo of binary drivers licensed for use with Darwin be restored. If this is never going to happen then would someone from Apple at least be willing to give a definitive no?

My plan would be to build a VMware Player image that can simply be downloaded and run on a typical x86 machine, provided the processor is at least halfway reasonably modern. So in that respect, the immediately useful drivers would be the ACPI platform expert, the ATA and SCSI family drivers, the AppleIntelPIIXATA driver, and the AppleLSIFusionMPT SCSI HBA driver.

-Dave

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