Secret Apple project worked to port Mac OS X to iPad-style ARM processors

In 2010, Apple’s Platform Technologies Group (a subdivision of the CoreOS department) spent some working on a previously-embargoed project to port the Mac OS X Darwin kernel to the ARMv5 chipset architecture — the same family of chipsets that currently powers iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. Does this mean Apple toyed with the idea of Mac OS X iPads, or with MacBook Airs running on ARM?

Here’s a snippet from the project summary:

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:

1. Getting the buildsystem into shape, so that it can build the kernel and kexts.
2. Building and booting the kernel into single user mode.
3. Booting the system into multi-user mode.

The project was made public several months ago. It involved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and was left for the CoreOS teams to continue. Since Mac OX X 10.7 Lion has since shipped, as have newer generations of iPad and MacBook Air, without any sign of MAC OS X on ARM, it’s unknown if this project is still ongoing or has since been put on the shelf. However, and the author of the paper is now a full-time employee at Apple, working as a CoreOS Engineer.

While some might find the idea of a Mac OS X iPad intriguing, Tablet PC, which put full Microsoft Windows on a tablet, never gained any traction in the market. It, like Mac OS X, was simply not designed for a multitouch user interface.

Microsoft, to their credit, is currently working on Windows 8, which will have both a Windows Phone-like Metro user interface optimized for tablets, and a more traditional Windows 7-like interface for desktops and laptops.

Instead of making MacBook Airs with ARM processors, Apple decided to take iOS software “Back to the Mac instead with OS X 10.7 Lion.

Given Apple’s preference for simplicity, and the huge sales they’ve achieved with iPad, it seems unlikely they’d deviate from their current strategy. Indeed, there has been more speculation of late that Apple would move iOS to the Mac, as opposed to moving the Mac to ARM.

However, Mac OS X once ran on Power PC chips, yet Apple had it secretly running on Intel chips at the same time, and shocked the world one day by making the change. It only makes sense for a company as forward thinking as Apple to have ARM-compatible builds of OS X in the development labs.

Would you hope to see full OS X working on a future iPad? Or a MacBook Air with an ultra-low power ARM processor?

Source: Delfte University of Technology

Why are there ZFS references in the latest iOS 5.1 beta?

Apple may have begun testing what appears to be ZFS (Zettabyte File System) support in the latest iOS 5.1 beta. If the information received by iMore is accurate. references to ZFS, including the mounting tools, are contained deep inside the system files. This raises a lot of questions about where Apple may be taking iOS storage in the future.

If you’re not familiar with ZFS, here’s Wikipedia‘s introduction:

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

In other words, it’s highly scalable and highly resilient, something you want in cloud environments. ZFS support was included in some earlier versions of Mac OS X, but was not included in the final, shipping version. Rumor has it Sun spoke to openly about Apple’s adoption of their technology, leading Apple to pull the plug. Whether that’s accurate or whether Apple simply determined it was going to go another way with OS X storage is unknown.

Even without official Apple support, we’ve seen OS X ZFS ports crop up since then. What sets this iOS implementation apart from some of the very original, official, OS X ports of ZFS is that it already contains the ZFS utilities (zpool, zdump, etc). By having the utilities already installed it means that the port is in a more complete stage of development and has full read + write access (unlike the original OS X ports).

So here’s the question again, if this information is accurate, why is Apple looking to include ZFS in iOS? Could it be part of a greater plan to integrate better cloud services into future versions of the iPhone and iPad?

More: Wikipedia