Happy 10th Leopard!

[647156]

Yes, as of today it's really a whole decade since Apple last shipped a new operating system that could run on PowerPC... :-O Originally due out earlier in 2007, it was delayed until October 26 2007 as Apple was busy working on some new handheld device or other that was barely noticed...

So let's celebrate this remarkable operating system that came on a single disc yet can run on everything from a Power Macintosh 8500 released in 1995 that has had a G4 upgrade dropped in, right up to a dual Xeon/eight core Mac Pro or Xserve, or even a generic PC or virtual machine should you prefer - a true universal OS if there ever was one.

"From G34 to Xeon...there is just one Leopard"

My launch day t-shirt that I picked up at the Apple Store shortly after the doors opened (that year they had done the thing of closing the stores in the afternoon to prepare, before re-opening for a couple of hours to a crowd in the evening). And no, Leopard itself joined the collection later given how expensive it was (especially the Server flavour) at launch and that I had nothing above a G3 back then anyway. A couple of years later they made no fanfare at the launch of Snow Leopard, just opening as normal in the morning - I went along to find the store pretty much deserted and no t-shirts, just a line of Intel boxes running the new OS - the Intel era had well and truly arrived :-(

 

[AphoticD]

Happy birthday Leopard, you svelte feline.

Booting into Leopard is a delight, every time.

 

[foxlet]

Technically they is more than one Leopard, since macOS uses fat binaries (with code for each architecture).

Interesting enough, my mobile daily driver, the MacBookPro5,3, is one of the last Intel portables that support OS X Leopard natively. It is still running strong with macOS Sierra and High Sierra, which is very surprising, seeing it supported a decade-old OS at one point.

 

[AphoticD]

Well if we're going to get technical... Should we celebrate each dot release?

It is amazing to consider the '08 model Mac Pro, Macbook Unibody, MBP, etc all have the ability to span 10.5 through to 10.13.

But I think the '07 MBP 15 and 17" might even take the cake with a stretch all the way back to 10.4, but will they run HiSI?

 

[foxlet]

Well if we're going to get technical... Should we celebrate each dot release?

It is amazing to consider the '08 model Mac Pro, Macbook Unibody, MBP, etc all have the ability to span 10.5 through to 10.13.

But I think the '07 MBP 15 and 17" might even take the cake with a stretch all the way back to 10.4, but will they run HiSI?

All the Intel portables that natively shipped with 10.5 were dropped from support and are officially stuck on El Capitan (10.11.6), even though the hardware can handle more just fine. My MacBook Pro is running High Sierra using custom tools (newCore and NaomiPrep), but the hardware is still fully compatible. Even better, performance actually improved, with no real reason for Apple to leave it out.

I believe the 2007 MacBook Pro series are too old, their CPUs are missing the SSE 4 instruction set and won't run further than the kernel with Sierra or newer.

 

[AphoticD]

All the Intel portables that natively shipped with 10.5 were dropped from support and are officially stuck on El Capitan (10.11.6), even though the hardware can handle more just fine. My MacBook Pro is running High Sierra using custom tools (newCore and NaomiPrep), but the hardware is still fully compatible. Even better, performance actually improved, with no real reason for Apple to leave it out.

I believe the 2007 MacBook Pro series are too old, their CPUs are missing the SSE 4 instruction set and won't run further than the kernel with Sierra or newer.

Ok, so your MBP 5,3 and my MB 5,1 and MP 3,1 would have the most capable OS range (inclusive of unsupported hacks for 10.12+).

It's great seeing Leopard run on a C2D or Xeon with an SSD, it feels super fast. But I think HiSI w/ APFS might have quicker boot times?

 

[foxlet]

Ok, so your MBP 5,3 and my MB 5,1 and MP 3,1 would have the most capable OS range (inclusive of unsupported hacks for 10.12+).

It's great seeing Leopard run on a C2D or Xeon with an SSD, it feels super fast. But I think HiSI w/ APFS might have quicker boot times?

The last time I ran a benchmark with that very same MacBook Pro, it was just slightly slower for boot, mainly the time taken to setup the APFS container and mounting the volumes, which are a little more complex than just a plain HFS+ disk.

When booted, however, operations on the SSD (particularly those that APFS improves upon like Copy-on-Write) are much faster compared to HFS, and the advantage of dynamic volumes is also well received.

Leopard would probably have all of them beat in startup time with the same setup, though!

 

[AphoticD]

The last time I ran a benchmark with that very same MacBook Pro, it was just slightly slower for boot, mainly the time taken to setup the APFS container and mounting the volumes, which are a little more complex than just a plain HFS+ disk.

When booted, however, operations on the SSD (particularly those that APFS improves upon like Copy-on-Write) are much faster compared to HFS, and the advantage of dynamic volumes is also well received.

Leopard would probably have all of them beat in startup time with the same setup, though!

Tiger with sharing services switched off boots quickly too

I clocked 10.4.11 booting just under 40 seconds on the DC G5 2.3Ghz with an mSATA SSD (at 1.5Gbps). I imagine a Sonnet SATA II PCIe card would maximize this setup and see a reduction of 5 - 10 seconds off that.

 

[647156]

It is amazing to consider the '08 model Mac Pro, Macbook Unibody, MBP, etc all have the ability to span 10.5 through to 10.13.

But I think the '07 MBP 15 and 17" might even take the cake with a stretch all the way back to 10.4, but will they run HiSI?

My 2008 Xserve runs Tiger (even though it shipped with Leopard) and runs Sierra fine, should run High Sierra though I haven't got around to trying it yet. Officially support ends at Lion for them, but later OSes work fine as they do have a 64-bit EFI - they are the same as the 2008 Mac Pro but Apple stopped support much earlier as they had used the same ATI X1300 card as the 2006 Xserve in them, which they didn't bother with 64-bit drivers for - and with a GT120 from a Mac Pro installed you get graphics acceleration too

 

[amagichnich]

My 2008 Xserve runs Tiger (even though it shipped with Leopard) and runs Sierra fine, should run High Sierra though I haven't got around to trying it yet. Officially support ends at Lion for them, but later OSes work fine as they do have a 64-bit EFI - they are the same as the 2008 Mac Pro but Apple stopped support much earlier as they had used the same ATI X1300 card as the 2006 Xserve in them, which they didn't bother with 64-bit drivers for - and with a GT120 from a Mac Pro installed you get graphics acceleration too

How does it run tiger when it shipped with leopard?

 

[647156]

How does it run tiger when it shipped with leopard?

Sometimes it is possible to run a version of OS X one older than the hardware originally came with, if the hardware is similar enough to the previous generation or to other Macs that were supported with that version. For instance my "early 2005" G5 would have originally shipped with Tiger but 10.3.9 boots on it, and the "early 2008" came with Leopard but 10.4.11 boots fine. When doing this you normally have to install and update the OS before it will boot as the older patch leve, of the OS that comes on the retail discs is too old to boot on the newer hardware.

The Xserve's graphics are unaccelerated in Tiger though despite the ATI X1300 in theory being the same card - when I looked into it, it appeared there is some subtle difference between the X1300 supplied with the 2006 and 2008 Xserve as the codes in the relevant kext in Tiger don't match the 2008 card, so it won't load the driver.

 

[Howl's Castle]

I’ve never used a Mac as a personal OS but I’d love to lol

 

[LightBulbFun]

Sometimes it is possible to run a version of OS X one older than the hardware originally came with, if the hardware is similar enough to the previous generation or to other Macs that were supported with that version. For instance my "early 2005" G5 would have originally shipped with Tiger but 10.3.9 boots on it, and the "early 2008" came with Leopard but 10.4.11 boots fine. When doing this you normally have to install and update the OS before it will boot as the older patch leve, of the OS that comes on the retail discs is too old to boot on the newer hardware.

The Xserve's graphics are unaccelerated in Tiger though despite the ATI X1300 in theory being the same card - when I looked into it, it appeared there is some subtle difference between the X1300 supplied with the 2006 and 2008 Xserve as the codes in the relevant kext in Tiger don't match the 2008 card, so it won't load the driver.

The Xserve2,1s X1300 uses the RV516 graphics chip where as the Xserve1,1s X1300 uses the RV515 Graphics chip, i suspect it might be possible to add the RV516s device ID to the respective tiger kexts and have it work

in regards to the fact Tiger boots its because it seems like Apple did add some Penryn support to the OS X kernel even tho no penryn hardware shipped with tiger you can see this in the source code. without this support OS X would just not boot and do the same thing it does on any other unsupported CPU. so its quite ineresting how apple added support even tho no penryn hardware shipped with tiger, I assume its because internally they where probably testing penryn hardware at the time, for example https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-792.25.20/osfmk/i386/cpuid.h.auto.html notice how penryn had not been given a "marketing" name in the source code. (also worth of note look at all the non intel CPUs ) just search the page for penryn theres just 1 entry

Well if we're going to get technical... Should we celebrate each dot release?

It is amazing to consider the '08 model Mac Pro, Macbook Unibody, MBP, etc all have the ability to span 10.5 through to 10.13.

But I think the '07 MBP 15 and 17" might even take the cake with a stretch all the way back to 10.4, but will they run HiSI?

I suspect it should be possible to run tiger on a 2008 MacBookPro4,1 then you could multiboot everything from tiger to high sierra

it would also be possible to install a Penryn CPU into an iMac7,1 and do the same

 

[Intell]

One of the few Macs that can easily run all Intell OSes is the iMac7,1 and iMac7,2. With a CPU upgrade, they can run 10.12+. My personal iMac has a CPU upgrade and I have an external drive that has many partitions for all the OS versions. It's pretty neat to watch it boot between them all.