Running Mac OS X Snow Leopard With Newer Mach_kernel

[CC_333]

 I posted this to mac68k.info, but I will repost both here and at ThinkClassic.org to increase exposure and maybe get some input.

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out of this is possible or not. It seems that in theory it should be, but when I try, I just get a hard freeze when it tries loading kexts.

Perhaps replacing all the Snow Leopard kexts with Lion or Mountain Lion equivalents? Trouble is, when I do that with an SL kernel, I get other bad things happening.Ideas?

cp.s. I'm doing this basically to see if it's possible. Other than potentially running SL on newer hardware, I don't know if there'd be any benefit.

UPDATE: I had a hunch that maybe boot.efi had something to do with the kernel-freezing-when-loading-the-kext-cache problem, so I copied it from a Mavericks install (along with a Mavericks mach_kernel), and it works now, except I had to replace all the kexts as well because the old SL ones no longer worked (endless dependency errors and load failures). However, I have a new problem: it would seem that launchd is now broken. I get the following error, repeated endlessly: "Data/Stack execution not permitted: launchd[pid 1] at virtual address 0x0, protections were read-only". I copied the launchd binary from the Mavericks install to no avail. I suspect maybe a configuration problem of some kind. Thoughts?

 

[IPalindromeI]

It's not likely going to work. OS X, like the BSDs and to a lesser degree, Windows, have userland and kernel are developed in tandem. It's not expected, that say, the kernel from OpenBSD 5.7 will work on a OpenBSD 4.9 system (or ntoskrnl.exe from 8.1 on XP) due to changes in system calls and structures. Something like Linux can (as long as you brought modules) because Linux and the userland are decoupled and Linux has a lenient backwards compatibility policy.

 

[raoulduke]

I would seek an answer within the osx86 context.  There is definitely greater kext flexibility.  But usually the kernel issues (or kext issues) in this context arise the other way - upgrading causes something to not work and requires rolling back drivers or whatever.  I can't find any evidence of kernel switching, though - including in the patched kernels list.

 

[CC_333]

Yes, perhaps I will. A lot of what I'm trying to do does fall well within that realm.

By the way, if you look up "snow leopard on ivy bridge" on Google, you will find that people recommend using a kernel from Mountain Lion to get it booting. I'm sure it's all theoretical, but it could work?

Perhaps Mavericks and Snow Leopard are too different (Mavericks did introduce a bunch of new stuff); I'll try a kernel from either Mountain Lion (which is suggested) or the 2012 MacBook Pro update for Lion (might be more similar to SL).

c

 

[raoulduke]

Sorry if you saw my original post. I have no Intel macs so I don't know how helpful me testing anything will be. But is the question now Mavericks? Mavericks almost certainly won't work with SL. It might with ML. I think I've seen stuff about ML kernel on Mavericks.

 

[CC_333]

Thats fine! No need to apologize!

Yeah, but the ML kernel is supposed to also work in SL, according to the article I found.

I'll give it a try.

c