SAsaurik·Dec 9, 2012
An older such project, that already works for numerous use cases (such as running parts of Apple's toolchain) is maloader.
https://github.com/shinh/maloader
In A New Project To Run Mac OS X Binaries On Linuxshinh
maloader
C2011–2019
shinh / maloader
maloader
mach-o loader for linux
9Distinct people
11Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
625GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
mach-o loader for linux
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
There are a number of past projects very similar to this one. The two I remember off-hand: - http://hcpnet.free.fr/applebsd.html -- NetBSD in-kernel COMPAT_MACH / COMPAT_DARWIN…
flatline3 used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-03-17 06:22:58 UTC to 2019-04-29 00:44:38 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesThere are a number of past projects very similar to this one. The two I remember off-hand:
- http://hcpnet.free.fr/applebsd.html -- NetBSD in-kernel COMPAT_MACH / COMPAT_DARWIN support. This got to the point of being able to run XDarwin, which is a pretty major step towards being able to run the WindowServer: http://hcpnet.free.fr/xdarwin.jpeg
- https://github.com/shinh/maloader -- A user-space Mach-O binary loader. The only goal was to be able to run Apple's binary toolchain on Linux, which it is able to do.
It's very possible to implement the necessary kernel APIs to run Mac / iOS Darwin binaries. Where you run into trouble is the massive software stack that sits on top of those OS APIs.
Without $10M or more to spend on development, it's simply not feasible to produce full binary-compatible replacements for Apple's software frameworks.
Read the rest
The best you can hope for is to copy over Apple's software from a real installation, and then run it atop your own kernel.
I love hacks like this, so god speed to christina_b. This is awesome.
To those of you telling the Christina to put her work on github to get contributors, I don't think that is particularly helpful advice. The barrier to entry on a project like this has nothing to do with the SCM being used.