Comment by fiddlerwoaroof

7 days ago

Yeah, it probably would be feasible to dust off the FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer[1] and turn that into native support for Linux apps on Mac.

I think Apple’s main hesitation would be that the Linux userland is all GPL.

[1]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/

2 comments

fiddlerwoaroof

Reply
leoh  7 days ago

If they built as a kernel extension it would probably be okay with gpl.

There’s a huge opportunity for Apple to make kernel development for xnu way better.

Tooling right now is a disaster — very difficult to build a kernel and test it (eg in UTM, etc.).

If they made this better and took more of an OSS openness posture like Microsoft, a lot of incredible things could be built for macOS.

I’ll bet a lot of folks would even port massive parts of the kernel to rust for them for free.

  • fiddlerwoaroof  6 days ago

    My impression is they’re basically trying to end third party kernel development; macOS has been making it progressively more difficult to use kexts and has been providing alternate toolkits for doing things that used to require drivers.