Voodoo 9.5 Kernel in Open Beta
 

http://rogue.infinitemac.com/pics/xnu-kernel.pngThe XNU-Development team has announced a Beta 1 release of the Voodoo 9.5 Kernel

The release marks the beginning of a unification of all kernels and setups, including sleep+speedstep, sse3+sse2 and intel+amd among other things.

Kernel Features:

• Supports sleep/resume as well as SpeedStep on most systems (use in conjunction with the SpeedStep kext)
• Massively improved SSE3 Emulation layer, up to 3 times faster and fully multithread-capable (thanks Turbo)
• Real-time clock fix for SSE2 users (no system slowdown/stutter when speedstep is on, supports less than 1 GHz cpu speeds)
• Raw ethernet packet support, useful for MAC spoofing and other kinds of network diagnostics (patch by Peter Bartoli)
• More secure: Execute-Disable (XD/NX) is turned on by default for supported systems
• HPET enabled on supported systems, cleaner boot-up code
• Legacy Vmware support by using busratio= bootflag.

Announcing on-the-fly opcode patching!
Thanks to great work done by kaitek, we are pleased to announce that Voodoo kernel will include an on-the-fly cpuid/opcode patcher. This will bridge the divide between intel and AMD users, as it nullifies the need to patch any binaries for AMD. This is also good news for SSE2 users who can now enjoy better performance in several of SSE3 applications.

The opcode patcher will be released in the final version of the kernel, none of the alpha or beta versions include it.

More information can be found here. Please ensure that you leave feedback to allow the XNU team to keep improving the kernel.

Links
XNU-Dev

With the new opcode patching, it should be possible to boot snow leopard on AMD?

~p-J

No idea, but I'm gonna try with the (f** hot!) XNU Kernel a retail installation of Leopard on AMD. Should work, shouldn't it? ;-)

only in the final versions... [crosses fingers]

That would be cool :-) Finally.

I have been testing this and with the patcher part I can load up apps that need patching but I am trying to get the os to boot without patching still need more testing will let you know how it is going

I really hope they fix the VMware issues... :(


Edit - Just an update so this post isn't misleading....

Apparently this isn't an issue, as long as the kernel is installed as "mach_kernel". This is a VMware problem not a kernel problem. :)

Quick note about the cpuid patcher, since I'm sure all AMD users are curious about it :

It works, but not 100%. Turned out dynamic libraries (ie. frameworks) are read in userspace, not kernel, so they can't be auto-patched by the kernel yet. We're working on a way to get around this. In the meantime you can still just patch your PrivateFrameworks folder only, and boot to GUI. Most other apps will not need any further patching from the 2nd beta onwards (out soon).

With the final release everyone should be able to boot retail though!