Roll your own PPC( booting OS X on IBM pSeries ).

[DearthnVader]

So I had a chance to buy two IBM Power7 pSeries severs sometime back for like $800 and I thought it would be cool to boot OS X in Qemu KVM mode.

Sadly I was short on funds and I let them slip though my fingers.

So now I'm thinking, how cool would it be to port OS X to run on IBM pSeries native?

That would open us up to a whole new world of Power-full machines to run the Mac OS.

Qemu-system-ppc64 emulates the pSeries machines well enough for us to do most of the heavy lifting without having to buy the real hardware until we already have OS X up and running in an emulator.

Here is what I have found so far:

SLOF( Slim Line Open Firmware ) only seems to support booting from ELF images, not XCOFF loaders like BootX, but we should be able to port the xcoff-loader package from Openbios to SLOF.

Next we need a supported file system for BootX to load the kernel and extensions from. SLOF supports Ext2 as does BootX, but it also should not be too hard to port the HFS/HFS+ packages to SLOF.

At that point we would likely be greeted by a kernel panic because OS X doesn't have any "platform drivers" for the IBM pSeries machines.

This is where the heavy lifting comes in, the rest of it is pretty simple code porting from Openbios to SLOF, now we'll be dealing with operating system level "platform drivers" that may or may not be documented or have source code for us to learn how to implement.

Assuming we can get the platform drivers implemented, then we would need drivers for the bus of our boot disk. Not too hard, but a moderate degree of difficulty.

That should get the basic system up and running.

 

[LightBulbFun]

So I had a chance to buy two IBM Power7 pSeries severs sometime back for like $800 and I thought it would be cool to boot OS X in Qemu KVM mode.

Sadly I was short on funds and I let them slip though my fingers.

So now I'm thinking, how cool would it be to port OS X to run on IBM pSeries native?

That would open us up to a whole new world of Power-full machines to run the Mac OS.

Qemu-system-ppc64 emulates the pSeries machines well enough for us to do most of the heavy lifting without having to buy the real hardware until we already have OS X up and running in an emulator.

Here is what I have found so far:

SLOF( Slim Line Open Firmware ) only seems to support booting from ELF images, not XCOFF loaders like BootX, but we should be able to port the xcoff-loader package from Openbios to SLOF.

Next we need a supported file system for BootX to load the kernel and extensions from. SLOF supports Ext2 as does BootX, but it also should not be too hard to port the HFS/HFS+ packages to SLOF.

At that point we would likely be greeted by a kernel panic because OS X doesn't have any "platform drivers" for the IBM pSeries machines.

This is where the heavy lifting comes in, the rest of it is pretty simple code porting from Openbios to SLOF, now we'll be dealing with operating system level "platform drivers" that may or may not be documented or have source code for us to learn how to implement.

Assuming we can get the platform drivers implemented, then we would need drivers for the bus of our boot disk. Not too hard, but a moderate degree of difficulty.

That should get the basic system up and running.

one place to look into is Mac On Linux

which is a PowerPC hypervisor but the very interesting thing about it, is it uses its own Platform expert, it does not pretend to be any specific mac but just its own AAPL,MOL with a custom Platform Expert kext it injects at boot time

so looking at the source code of that might give you some clues

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

It looks like somebody thinks about building PPC Hackintosh .

 

[barracuda156]

Ideally we would also want to either rebuild 10.6 with ppc64 slices or otherwise upgrade 10.5.8 to 10.6.8 kernel with ppc64 slice and whatever else possible.

 

[ervus]

Have you seen this?

www.talospace.com/2018/08/making-your-talos-ii-into-power-mac.html