Xavier HUMBERT <xavier.humbert@xavhome.fr.eu.org> said:
> But let me question, and interrogate : you mean MacOSX, not only Darwin,
> right ?

As usual, we target a kernel emulation. One the Darwin kernel is emulated,
MacOS X userland should work.

There is one notable exception, which is the blue box (aka Classic). 
Except if someone volunteer to implement a virtual machine framework in
NetBSD, this will not happen (At least I won't do it: too much work which
is not worth it in my opinion)

> So the goal is to have Quartz/Aqua in lieu of XWindow, at least on
> PowerPC, right ?

Right. I would enjoy a Quartz to X11 bridge, but again, it's a lot of 
programming, and I'm not sure it's worth it. But maybe the Darwin guys will
do it one day... Anyway, I think we could be able to have quartz on /dev/ttyE5
and X11 on /dev/ttyE6...

> Since MacOSX/Darwin is already largely based on NetBSD, with a few adds
> from FreeBSD, is there an interest other than technical performance to
> have MacOSX on NetBSD ?

Christos mentionned there could be a performance benefit. It's true that when
I look at the actual Mach implementation, I really wonder how they acheived
to get some performances with this design. The design is nice, but it looks
like there is a lot of overhead. I'm really curious to see how we compare to
Darwin here.

Another point: the NetBSD kernel runs on much more powerPC machines than the
Darwin kernel. Any NetBSD/PowerPC port could be able to run MacOS X binaries. 
Provided of course that a license is purchased from Apple.

The mach emulation can also be used to help other mach-based emulated OS. 
This might be a bit difficult since a few details might have diverged a lot.

I'm still running my desktop machine on MacOS, mainly for MacSOUP (my mail 
and news reader. There is no better news reader IMHO, and it's available only 
on MacOS, but you know it). I'd switch it to NetBSD if MacSOUP was running on 
NetBSD. This is another motivation for doing it.

And finnally, yes, it's fun.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@netbsd.org