In 2010 Apple put a team of engineers from the CoreOS department to work on a secret project that aimed to run Mac OS X Darwin on the ARM processors now found in our iDevices. Apple wanted Mac OS X Darwin to run on ARMv5 series processors, so a team of engineers worked for no less than 3 months on the entire project. Everything was kept secret until one was published undergraduate theses of one of the engineers who worked on the project and in it was explained the way in which the engineers managed to run OS X Snow Darwin on the ARM processors and also the problems encountered in the development of the project.
The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform. The project has three major milestones:
- Getting the build system into shape, so that it can build the kernel and kexts.
- Building and booting the kernel into single user mode.
- Booting the system into multi-user mode.
During the development of the project, the one who wrote the thesis was only an intern engineer at Apple, so the whole project could have been a fake one because Apple has a habit of testing new employees in projects that never end up being implemented in a real product. Now the engineer is an employee of the CoreOS department within Apple, so everything he did back then was more than good since Apple decided to hire him. As part of the project, the engineers managed to run Mac OS X Darwin on an ARM processor, but nothing they had done until the end of the tests was ready for the release of a beta version of a product.
Week Tim Cook stated that Apple is not thinking of implementing ARM processors on Macs, and his statement could be based on similar projects that demonstrated that Mac OS X cannot run in excellent conditions on an ARM processor.
