OS X for SSE Project

Hi,

This thread has been created for the purpose of exchanging information regarding OS X being emulated on SSE processors by using a lightweight linux distribution as a host, and the open-source application qemu to emulate the SSE2 instructions. The linux distribution will serve as a host for qemu and will be loaded into ram for maximum speed. I have chosen Featherlinux as the current host distro because it is only 122mb in size, can fit into a small amount of ram, and has qemu pre-installed.

So far there are 3 people working on this project. Ai Haibara, Embio, and myself. Anyone else feel free to contribute.

Project Information

Aim: To get OS X emulated at the most usable speed possible, and create a DVD installer.
Method: The Featherlinux CD will be altered to house a 10.4.8 installation dvd, the necessary scripts required to create the files for qemu (harddisk image) and scripts to launch the virtual harddrive or native harddrive in full screen mode at startup.
Requirements: SSE PC with more than 512mb of ram, a decent graphics card, and a dvd-rom drive.

Our first goal is to find out what limitations we have other than ram and graphics. Embio and I are waiting for some more RAM before we can get to testing again, but if anybody has a PC that meets the requirements in the meantime feel free to try it and post your successes/failures.

My P3 is a custom built PC with a 'coppermine' processor, 256mb RAM and a radeon 9250 128mb (PCI) graphics card.

You CANNOT test this method in vmware because the video support that vmware provides does not work with qemu.
When booting from OS X in qemu, use the follow flags in the boot prompt :

platform=X86PC "Graphics Mode"="800x600x16" -v

If you need a demonstration of how to use qemu/featherlinux, download the attached file.
To run Featherlinux in ram, enter "knoppix toram" in boot options when the cd loads.

References/Thing of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qemu - Qemu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather_Linux - Featherlinux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine - KVM
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/kqemu-doc.html - Qemu Accelerator



Good luck,
Dragon