Mac OS X Internals » Windows

IBM Assured Execution Environment

amit — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 20:06:04 +0000

Several years ago, while I was working at the IBM Almaden Research Center, we came up with a security mechanism called the Assured Execution Environment (AxE). We had implementations for Windows XP and Mac OS X. (Although AxE supports code signing as a feature, it’s not the same—in any case, this was long before code signing was known as a forthcoming feature in Mac OS X "Leopard".)

An evolved version of the Windows implementation is now available for download from the IBM alphaWorks web site.

Update: VMware Workstation, Windows XP SP2 in a Dual-Processor VM

amit — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:18:23 +0000

This is a rather trivial update, but here are some points of interest:

Knoppix seems very stable overall.
We fixed the pixels-per-row vs bytes-per-row discrepancy in the kernel, so the X Window server has precise information now.
We have tried VMware Workstation and VMware Player. Both work really well.
This is a screenshot of VMware Workstation running a dual-processor VM instance with Windows XP SP2 as the guest operating system.

Test-driving Linux on an Intel-based Macintosh

amit — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 16:10:46 +0000

I do have strange friends. Take Mark Smith, for example. Mark is essentially a Windows Internals guy — I would call him OS-agnostic at best. In particular, he is certainly not a “Macintosh person”. However, he recently purchased an Intel-based Macintosh because he felt like running Linux (an operating system that he does not normally use) on it.

Then, there is Benjamin Reed, who is decidedly a Linux guy. That said, Ben owns and uses Macintosh computers, albeit with relentless complaints.

Somehow, they think of me as a Mac OS X person â€” I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I claim to be no less OS-agnostic than Mark.

So it was this unlikely team that decided to see if we can get Linux to run on an Intel-based Macintosh.

We did succeed, and since Ben is somewhat of a Linux-distribution-connoisseur, we thought of releasing a prototype distribution for Intel-based Macintoshes. However, as far as “first-to-announce” is concerned, we were beaten to the punch by the Mactel Linux people, who posted pictures of their successful Linux-booting attempt yesterday.

Nevertheless, “Test-driving Linux on an Intel-based Macintosh” is a short story about making a penguin eat an Apple â€” it is a technical description of how we ran Linux on a 17-inch iMac. Moreover, we are releasing a test-drive mini-distribution as an HFS+ bootable disk image. Simply burn it to an optical disc, and boot with the opt key pressed. The mini distribution uses the 2.6.15.4 kernel, with a user-space environment based on the Busy Box software. When you are in Linux, be sure to look around for interesting information in the /proc and /sys directories.

If you have problem reports or any questions about this, please use this forum thread for discussion.