Roadmap

[wjk]

This post will be updated to show what tasks and projects that we are currently working on or would appreciate help with, and tasks and projects that are on our longer-term plan for PureDarwin. Community contributions towards implementing anything here are welcome.

Current Tasks

1. Fix libsystem_platform #95. I am passing the -bind_at_load flag to ld just as I should, but inexplicably ld ignores it and emits lazy-stubs anyways, which is an error in libplatform because it is lower level than libdyld. Debugger analysis does not reveal anything more than that it successfully has received the flag, and that it is still emitting lazy symbols.

Roadmap

1. Get xnu to boot, at least until it tries to start launchd. This requires that a number of kexts be implemented, some of which may need to be written from scratch.
2. Add launchd and launchctl, and make them able to spawn an interactive shell.
3. Implement a terminal-based installer that will format a drive as HFS+ and copy PureDarwin into it.

Wishlist

1. Read/write APFS support. Everything we will need is documented in this PDF. I would suggest first building a library that can read and write APFS data in abstract data buffers, and then wrap it in a kext so that it can be used on PD. Note that such a library can be developed separately from the rest of the repository, so nothing is stopping anyone from starting on it today.
2. Foundation and Foundation-level model frameworks
3. CoreGraphics (enough to run an arbitrary self-contained GUI)
4. AppKit (and the rest of the public macOS GUI infrastructure)
5. A macOS-like desktop and applications!

[Daasin]

What do you think about the proposed fork idea from #98 ?

Could help with points 3 & 5 from the wishlist too :3

[kjarex]

Which kexts are missing to get xnu to boot?