Re: PowerPC port

[Peter Bruin]

Hi,

José Salaver Torres <josator@telefonica.net> wrote:

> I have been searching for a project about making a port for powerpc of
> the gnu-Mach microkernel, the only thing I have found is a project for
> making run the osf-mach into Hurd, that seems crap, because I have read
> that osf-mach doesn't have a GPL license.

There is a port of the Hurd to the PPC running OSF Mach, which I have been 
working on for a while.  A little info and some patches for the Hurd and glibc 
(from August) are on http://huizen.dds.nl/~pjbruin/hurd/.  It basically runs, 
but it's not very stable and many things don't work yet.  Only older Macs are 
supported, i.e. the ones that can run MkLinux.

In order to run the Hurd on newer Macs there is a project, started by José 
Marchesi <jemarch@es.gnu.org> and me, to port the OSKit to the PowerPC and then 
adapt OSF Mach to use it and get the Hurd to run on this version of Mach.  
There is a Savannah page on http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/hurdppc.  This 
project is still in a very early stage, however.  We had a discussion about the 
licensing some time ago; the license is not GPL, but it still seems to be 
compatible with the GPL, and after consulting Richard Stallman we concluded 
it's OK to use OSF Mach.

If you would like to work on a port of Mach to the PowerPC, then you should 
probably choose this project.  Unfortunately I've been too busy to work on it 
for the last months, and I haven't heard from José in a while either, so some 
help would be very welcome.

Thanks,
Peter