Comment by hmry
1 day ago
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as macOS, is in fact, macOS/Darwin, or as I've recently taken to calling it, macOS plus Darwin."
"What you're referring to as Darwin, is in fact, Darwin/XNU."
"What you're referring to as XNU, is in fact, BSD/Mach."
I seem to remember it being possible to run macOS-less Darwin several years ago, not sure if that's still possible or if Apple has modified it so much at this point that it's useless without at least some macOS components.
> several years ago
2024, maybe? needs some renewed interest perhaps:
https://www.puredarwin.org/
Needs someone to pick it up: its project leader passed away last year.
https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
Apple stopped updating this 5 years ago.
I remember getting it to boot once long ago but I didn't have anything to actually do with it.
Looks like it is still getting updates and has moved here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
I now think of things in terms of token budget. I put my MacOS VM aspirations on the back burner because the effort was taking up 100 GB of space and I made poor choices when it came to laptop specs. Now I'm thinking why not rebuild XNU but I have other things I'd rather spend the tokens on. I don't want to delay other projects so I'm giving up something stupid and fun.