PureDarwin Nano

This page describes the minimal components needed for a minimal PureDarwin system (also known as "PureDarwin Nano"). 

Contents

1. Download
2. Components
   1. Bootloader
   2. Installer
   3. Interactive mode
3. Virtual machine
   1. VMware
   2. QEMU

This system is a proof-of-concept of a minimal bootable Darwin 9 system that can be built from the components that Apple provides through the DarwinBuild project.

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Download

A ready-made VMware virtual machine containing a minimal Darwin 9 system (PureDarwin nano (based on 9C31)) can be downloaded here.

MD5  (puredarwinnano0df46.tbz2) = f6853449e263dd83bba0ac9662f29143
SHA1 (puredarwinnano0df46.tbz2) = 7a32331fcb443538f0737c172160f3cef6067ec9

The virtual machine contains an ISO that could be used on real hardware as well.

Components

Here is what such a minimal system needs to consist of:

Notes: VoodooPS2* or (exclusively) ACPIPS2Nub.kext and ApplePS2Controller.kext (sources) are only required if you want to use a PS/2 keyboard and/or mouse. The number of files can be further brought down by using a prelinked mach_kernel. This removes the need for the System directory. Using kextcache, the boot process can be faster, the image bigger.

Bootloader

Of course, the system needs to be made bootable by boot and/or efiboot.  Chameleon is reported to work.

Installer

An installer is currently being prepared.

Interactive mode

An interactive shell is run by default. In fact, /sbin/launchd is replaced by a shell script that runs /bin/bash.

The Z shell (zsh) is also usable as an interactive UNIX command interpreter (shell).

Virtual machine

"PureDarwin nano" reported to work with VMware products (Fusion and Player), QEMU and VirtualBox See VMware page, QEMU page and VirtualBox page for more information.

VMware

QEMU