On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 2:51 AM, William Kucharski <William.Kucharski at sun.com> wrote: > > On Mar 1, 2008, at 6:32 PM, John Sonnenschein wrote: > > > So, hence my question if anyone knows. The significant difference > > between a G3 and a G4 ( aside from altivec ) is? > > I don't believe the difference between a G3 and G4 is as big an issue > in this case as the difference between an ODW and a PowerMac, which is > quite substantial.
I understand that, but as I mentioned, it must be done, and there's no real way around that fact. > Specifically, the components used in an ODW are documented as to their > behavior - addressing, interrupt levels, etc. > > Despite the Linux distros available for the PowerMac, Apple has never > released public documentation on their custom boards and bridge chips, > and so the Linux drivers have largely been reverse engineered using > various clean room methods and perhaps from the code contained in > associated Darwin releases. > > Though IANAL, I suspect any knowledge of how the PowerMac works gained > from Linux code would thus be covered under the GPL and would not be > allowed in OpenSolaris because of conflicts between the GPL and CDDL. > > I haven't read Apple's Open Source license lately, so I'm not sure if > we would have to clean room reverse engineer such information ourselves > or if we could gather it from the Darwin drivers ourselves given proper > APSL attributions. APSL is quite similar to the CDDL and is compatible ( hence why OSX Leopard has dtrace ). If I were to import code, I would do it directly from XNU. -- PGP Public Key 0x437AF1A1 Available on hkp://pgp.mit.edu
