Voodoo 9.5 Kernel in Open Beta

[R0GUE]

The 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