Classic Mac OS Software (Discussions on Applications) > Hacking the System, Mac OS 9.3, and Beyond !

Alternative Idea: MacOS 9 Subsystem for Linux

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IIO:
what i currently fail to see is the reasoning/use case for such a software.

what could it be good for? that you could run OS9 on a PPC? hm, that is what it does natively already. or under OSX, in bluebox. emulation exists, too.

more interesting (but of course also 100 times more difficult) would be a classic enviroment for 64 bit (powermac G5? IBM power9 and power10?) but i am sure that wont happen.
 
 
we had a development wishlist here some time ago. it contains things like USB 2 support, firewire 800 support, new graphics cards drivers for MacOS9. a new extensive HID driver with controlpanel. new device drivers for certain outboard gear. a new finder with more options, support for UTF and long names. a solution for formatting 16 TB HDDs by raising the blocksize. H264 for quicktime. exceeding the 1.5 GB RAM limit. blueray driver.

those should be much more realistic than dream projects such as AHCI support, 64 bit support, or a linux classic enviroment, where probably the whole OS has to be rewritten for or where you even might end up with unsolvable hardware problems.

however, an idea is an idea and an offer is an offer.

teroyk:

--- Quote from: IIO on June 30, 2022, 11:48:36 PM ---support for UTF and long names. a solution for formatting 16 TB HDDs by raising the blocksize.

--- End quote ---

Actually UTF-16 support is already in Mac OS 9.2.1 and up.
Just check non US installation CD or DVD what came with machine,
there is Unicode folder that has extension and Worldtext folder that has Writing-app.
Starting MacOS 8.1 there is support up to 512 byte long filenames in HFS+, but
problem is that somobody has to write software that read filenames as they are on the disk.

But I am just guy that think opposite direction Linux subsystem for MacOS 9:
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=5481
that Connectix already made, but it is lost in history.

Mat:
I have to agree with IIO.
Hardware really is our last problem. We have tons of good machines going up to 2GHz. What we need first for our real daily work are some basic programs. A modern PDF reader (going on with Ghostscript for example), TLS 1.3 what might be done by porting Mbed TLS, or a xml (.odt/.docx) reader.
Later we should care about bigger more complicated projects like USB 2.0 driver, WPA2 and such stuff.

If a team would care about a recent webbrowser (e.g. porting netsurf) lives also would be a lot easier for us. Also some "driver" for an recent "media decoder chip", like done for MPG2 with the Wired 4DVD back than, would bring us foreward a lot.

68k is in general served well with existing emulation at PPC CPUs built into MacOS and all the software emulators at different plattforms. A PPC emulated environment that you suggest will be slower than our existing hardware. And it will never bee what MacOS 9 is about. Just see what "Classic" did to us, and what problems it still is creating all the time.

What might be a better aim is to create a kind of JIT compiler so that one of the real beasts like Power9 can act compatible to our E600 cores and serve as a much faster replacement CPU. But I doubt that it can be done by a single developer (and still someone would have to produce Upgradecards with such new CPUs).

robespierre:
If you're going to shoot for the moon with talk about Power9, maybe the right way to think about it is how you would get MacOS 9 running under a hypervisor. Then it would be possible to run it "natively" on modern Power9 hardware like the Talos workstations.

Mat:
Mac OS 9 under a hypervisor at a Talos would open a can of worms to my underdstanding. It would mean to need to care about any peripherial (like RAM, Timers, I/O, PCI etc. etc. etc.), an all that without the possibility to manipulate the OS itselve as we have no Mac OS 9 sources (just Mac OS 7 sources are around), ... how should that become possible without coming down to simple emulation again?

That was why I suggested to "just" care about the CPU. But as said, I do not really see any point in "new" and faster hardware without any software that would need modern computing power.

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