L4/Darwin (aka Darbat)

The L4/Darwin project is an experimental port of Darwin to the L4 microkernel to study the characteristics of a large-scale microkernel-based system. It includes a port of IOKit to L4, a modified libc to communicate with the Darbat Server, and of course XNU with many of the machine-dependent parts heavily modified (pmap, thread/task creation, etc) but much left unchanged (most of BSD, and large parts of OSFMK work without modification).

http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/darbat/

The Wikipedia entry provides and interesting comparison of L4 with Mach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_kernel

Read about this on the darwin lists. Pretty darn cool. Too bad XNU hasn't (will it ever be) been relased for darwin 8.5. :/

would be cool to exchange the kernel and still be able to run OSX

/Johan

I read about this at ArsTechnica. One of the guys working on "Darbat" is talking about the project there:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/fo.../m/645003648731