site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Graham J Lee writes:

Hi,

I asked this sort of thing over on darwin-x86 a couple of days ago, but it's been rather quiet, so I thought I'd come over here :-)

I notice that the Darwin 8.4 source corresponds to "Mac OS X 10.4.4 (for PowerPC)"; what does that actually mean for i386 users? Does it mean one or more of the following:

[i] It won't interoperate with Mac OS X on an Intel Mac

At least this much is true for IOKit drivers. Apple intentionally broke ABI compatability between Darwin and MacOSX on Intel by removing padding from a few critical IOKit and libkern classes (see the "Universal binary: not compatible with its superclass" thread on darwin-drivers for details). In order to build a an 8.4 source based Darwin which could interoperate with MacOSX on Intel, you would need to walk all the header files shipped with the "Universal" sdk in Xcode and patch Darwin to remove padding the same way that it was removed from the headers (presumably) used to build MacOSX. The stated reason for this ABI breakage was to reduce the wired memory usage of the kernel. It has created a mess for me, because I'd like to ship universal drivers for a PCI-Express NIC, but I cannot test them except on Darwin because no currently shipping Intel Mac has an open PCI-e slot. But Darwin is no longer binary compatible with MacOSX, so I cannot test on Darwin. So this means we'll have to play catch up and release new drivers when Apple releases Intel machines with open PCI-e slots. Sigh. Drew _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com