Help from HackOS

[SergeySlice]

Hello all!
I am one of developers for Hackintosh. Our projects here https://github.com/CloverHackyColor.
I am interesting in ravynOS and want to contribute to it. We know many mac technologies for example MachO library, ACPI, SMBIOS, SMC protocol. But I know nothing about FreeBSD so I have a difficulty to understand how it should work.
How to start? Whom to ask? Discord and Matrix are not possible from my country. Telegram will be good.

1. Is it possible to install ravynOS on separate partition on GPT formatted drive don't break other partitions?
2. How to start it from UEFI BIOS? What bootloader did you use? What shall I change in the Clover bootloader to launch ravynOS?
3. What is the sequence of launching MachO application from the OS? Where should I look? Why any problem exists?
   And other questions...

[SergeySlice]

About Swift look this project
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift

[mszoek]

Hello and welcome! You can ask me :)

I am focusing for now on source code compatibility and a desktop GUI like macOS. This means application level, not kernel - no kexts or anything like that are supported, and we are not using xnu but FreeBSD's kernel with Mach support and some other bits added to it. On the app level, I am aiming to be compatible with Catalina (10.15) to start. It's simpler and not a moving target. We have a reasonable AppKit, Foundation, CF, CoreGraphics, Quartz, etc and I've written WindowServer and partially implemented Dock, SystemUIServer, and so on, and a minimal Terminal.app. It is all written in Objective-C and C built against our Cocoa frameworks.

Under the covers, everything is still ELF for now (not Mach-O). We will probably want to switch that soon but it will be a ton of work. I patched LLVM to support what we need on FreeBSD, so -F <path> and -framework etc work properly with ELF for now.

Answers to your questions :)

1. It is! Boot the Live ISO and look at /bin/install.sh to see what you need to do. This guide may also be helpful. It's for the previous 0.5 releases but still valid. Skip the part called "To use the whole disk" if you want to preserve existing partitions.
2. It needs UEFI so make sure that is on. It should boot on any x86_64 machine that has UEFI, no special bootloaders required. FreeBSD's EFI bootloader will be installed as part of install.sh or manual steps from the wiki. You can also run it in a VM if that's easier. I mostly run it in Vmware Fusion.
3. Launching stuff is what you'd expect... if it's on the Dock, you can click it. (The only thing working is Terminal.app, the others are placeholders and Dock is WIP.) You can use open from the shell, although it's not very useful without any apps installed. You can run stuff from the shell directly like ./Test.app/Contents/ravynOS/Test as well, same as on macOS. LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents are also supported (with json files instead of xml for now) and they will start from your per-user launchd after GUI login.

If you have some Mach-O expertise and want to help me convert everything to build as dylib and Mach-O binaries, I would love that. There are some tricky things in libc to figure out. It makes a lot of assumptions about things being ELF.

[SergeySlice]

Hello Zoe,
Glad to see your answer!
What sources I have to look first of all? What sources are responsible for the command "open"?

[SergeySlice]

But you have to choose will libc be for ELF or for Mach-O. How do you go to mix? FreeBSD applications and Mac applications.

[reactive-firewall]

But you have to choose will libc be for ELF or for Mach-O. How do you go to mix? FreeBSD applications and Mac applications.

I know right!? however see the recent response they gave me for that line of thought in comments on issue 510

[reactive-firewall]

What is the sequence of launching MachO application from the OS?

For the typical user (strictly userland scope):

3. Launching stuff is what you'd expect... if it's on the Dock, you can click it. (The only thing working is Terminal.app, the others are placeholders and Dock is WIP.) You can use open from the shell, although it's not very useful without any apps installed. You can run stuff from the shell directly like ./Test.app/Contents/ravynOS/Test as well, same as on macOS. LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents are also supported (with json files instead of xml for now) and they will start from your per-user launchd after GUI login.

However, as the OS is a derivative/fork of FreeBSD (and not the darwin/XNU) the OS has the BSD libc and thus does not yet support true OS launching of mach-O. Essentially the only way Mach-O apps have been launched is by modifying the MH_EXCUTABLE's load commands with the BSD libc CRT load logic (see https://gist.github.com/mszoek/2916926a57011bc369e0431561f3d5f7 for that facinating PoC) ... basically there is no MH_DYDL at this time; And if the project never opts for kernl ABI (:shrug: not my call btw), then we might not need one, as it is possible to implement libobjc (and the RT) as ELFs with LLVM's clang (no need for Apple's clang there) and the ELFs will be supported by the BSD libc RT and ELF OBJ-C RT as already done before by cocoatron for linux/windows (but in this project's case FreeBSD is even closer to darwin, so porting is simpler)

(obligatory disclaimer: I am not an expert on the CRT loaders nor the ELF/Mach-O format specs)

[SergeySlice]

Supporting only ELF is no sense. There are already FreeBSD with different skins. I want support Mach-O with dylibs and I asked for sources where there is the procedure.

[SergeySlice]

A library for parsing Plist
https://sourceforge.net/p/cloverefiboot/code/HEAD/tree/rEFIt_UEFI/Platform/plist.c

[SergeySlice]

See also MacPorts
https://www.macports.org

It provides thousands of opensource libraries (for example libpng) in Mach-O format.

[SergeySlice]

Moreover, qt5-qt6.