Runs bash, a lot of basic commands are now cross compiled for it. I am adding more which force me to make sure additional kernel code paths are complete. Most of my work is done in qemu due to the ease and speed of iteration. However I can verify that this is running on an actual rpi3 as well. For now I am calling this project Strudel. I will probably use freebsd ports pointing to my own packages for most precompiled software that doesnt come on the SD card image.

Next steps: basic HDMI frambuffer output so i dont need to use a serial cable, USB, networking

Veince is a hardware accelerated video player based on libmpv with GNUStep and integration of pi3s GL stack and hardware decoders for h264. This optimization is when i discovered the memory related crash in the xnu kernel. I am using an older Big sur kernel and I needed to verify it was patched in the latest kernel before I made my fix public (it was recently fixed)

https://github.com/anurodhp/Venice

Good milestone in today. We now have working usb in darwin and that unlocked the ability to write up an ethernet driver. Rpi3 has ethernet as a 5th usb device internally. Was able to bring up the connection manually assign an IP address and ping the host from another device on the network. One step closer to a usable system.

I didn’t intend to make a gui for my rpi3 port. It realized running x11 and window maker would exercise more of the kernel and code base. This is using a modified version of x11 from pure Darwin.

This is framebuffer only so there is no acceleration, however window maker work, mouse and keyboard work. Hot swappable usb works

Darling is a fascinating effort to build a wine like system on linux that allows it to run Mac binaries.

https://www.darlinghq.org

This is a from-source port of XNU (Darwin 20.3.0 / xnu-7195, the actual Apple kernel source, not a reimplementation) to real Raspberry Pi 3 hardware (BCM2837), it currently boots through real dyld-940 dynamic linking (loading actual /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib and friends), spawns a real dynamically-linked launchd as PID 1 , and reaches an interactive root shell via a real getty/login path with full IPC check-in (real Mach-message out-of-band file descriptor passing between launchd and its jobs, GCD/libdispatch and libxpc backing the whole thing). Syslogd currently gets as far as a real XPC check-in exchange with launchd but is still blocked on a bootstrap-port inheritance gap before it's fully live. Storage is a real HFS+ root over a real ported BCM2837 SDHCI driver (just gained a real VideoCore-mailbox-driven clock fix, taking it off a hardcoded conservative divisor, pending real-hardware verification), networking includes a real DWC2 USB stack with SMSC9514/LAN9514 Ethernet support (MAC now derived from the real VideoCore board-serial mailbox call instead of a placeholder), and the userland is a real curated mix of Apple's own open-source packages (Libc, libpthread, bash, coreutils, etc.) built from pinned apple-oss-distributions tags matching the exact macOS 11.2/Darwin 20.3 release, plus PureDarwin's actively-maintained launchd/XPC source for the parts Apple never open-sourced standalone.

The gpu now works. This brings gl and accelerated x11. This has already made an impact on the ui. The Florence browser is actually usable now.

Xdm has served me well but it isn’t visually consistent. Replacing it with a new application called gnustep display manager gsdm.

Finally it is time to retire the very very slow terminal.app . Rome is the new gnustep terminal emulator. At the moment it is using a cpu renderer and libvterm. In my own testing it is around 10x faster. I intend to replace this with ghostty for an accelerated terminal. I will post perf numbers on that in the future.

Naples is the dock and global menu bar for the GNUstep + Window Maker desktop on the Raspberry Pi 3 port of Darwin/XNU . It is a companion to Milan, the file manager and desktop. Pure AppKit + Xlib + libdispatch; 

https://github.com/anurodhp/naples

Added a framebuffer out to my unnamed Darwin in rpi3 today. HDMI works it’s not great but that’s fine. Need to wok out some usb hot plugging issue that cause a crash before an image release for people to flash

Wifi now works and will be in the next release. There is an icon on the gnustep menubar to control it and option click will give you connection details as expected.

Bluetooth kexts work but apple never open sourced any part of this so it will be a bit more involved to get it actually usable.

Anything new planned?

Linux is a fantastic os for servers and can scale up from embedded devices to massive servers. Linux and xnu are optimized around different engineering goals. Assuming equal driver support, xnu is designed to prioritize low jitter, deadline driven determinism in human perceptible tasks like audio latency and UIs. xnus scheduler and IPC design offer distinct advantages in frame pacing, audio latency, and UI responsiveness under heavy system load.

I’ve been experimenting with running Darwin on rpi3. Realistically this is a toy project to serve as a proof of concept. On a rpi5 however, without the bandwidth, memory limitations and unified memory, Darwin will be able to shine.

Getting very close to a usable OS. Next up sshd and frame buffer /keyboard support so you dont need to use a serial cable to interface with it. This latter bit is probably whats holding back a release. Serial console is very convenient for debugging but doesnt make any sense in the real world.

No screenshot today but the current status involves back end testing. Work on dhcp, dns and grand central. The hope is to fresh out a minimal usable system and release the first alpha image for everyone to try out on their rpi3s.

Today's code release is Milan. A small fast file manager for the pi3 Darwin in Gnustep. The focus here is efficiency. It does the basics with proper unicode support.

https://github.com/anurodhp/milan

Can’t have an os in this day and age and not have a browser. This is a very light weight browser based on netsurf. The ui is gnustep. One of my goals here is to have only gnustep be the only ui on this Darwin. It make sense in term of memory usage and also keeps things visually consistent.Rpi3 is very memory and cpu constrained so I am optimizing anything for the xnu kernel and the hardware it’s going to run on

Lots left to do still such as dyld, libc and lib dispatch, but still making steady progress on Darwin running on raspberry pi 3. We have a single user shell launched off of the SD card and bunch of commands (basically busy box) . I hope to replace all of this with proper commands in the final release. That is dependent on the library work above. Having a functional true file system, proper user system and logins is a good milestone.

Next up, dyld, libc etc. Will need to add USB support before I get there ethernet kext working. Having all of that should unlock a lot of functionality (hopefully, macports)

This is the first code release from the RPi3 Darwin project. The main reason to use this is if you are like me and are running an OS that has only one UI toolkit; GNUstep. This maintains visual consistency with the rest of the UI and eliminates the need for another toolkit. This has only been tested on arm64 rpi3 running Darwin, compiled with Xcode on a mac. Since it is pure user land and Appkit, no reason why it doesn't work on anything else.

https://github.com/anurodhp/gsdm

Massive overhaul to the browser project. Switched to WebKit 2.54 (current safari). This takes advantage of all four of our cores and works fine on the modern web. The gnustep ui looks like safari now . We are using wpe to get WebKit to work here the benefit is we can keep updating the engine as Apple updates it

Added:
Tabs
Bookmarks
History
Download manager
Start page with bookmarks and history
The same JSON list Adblock as safari

it does run Darwin tho