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La question
Le lecteur superutilisateur Braiam souhaite savoir quels sont les obstacles techniques qui empêchent les utilisateurs normaux d’installer OS X sur leur PC:
Lets forget about the EULA and any other legal regulation. I’m not interested in those.
Everyone knows that until recently, OS X (or Mac OS) could only be run on PowerPC-based Macs, but that changed when Apple started using Intel’s CPUs, and opened up the possibility of installing OS X on PCs. Again lets forget about legalese, I’m going for factual and technical references. After the switch, users started experimenting until it was possible to install and run OS X on a PC.
Does anyone know why OS X wouldn’t work on a normal person’s PC? Is it some piece of hardware that is custom made or tailored for OS X that only Mac computers have? Or is it just Apple making computer users’ lives difficult on a technical level?
C’est vraiment aussi compliqué qu’il semble «matériel» d’exécuter OS X sur PC, ou les différences entre ordinateurs Mac et PC sont-elles plus petites (et plus simples) que la plupart des gens ne le croient?
La réponse
Journeyman Geek, contributeur de SuperUser, a la solution pour nous:
Oddly enough? Apple systems check for a specific chip and refuse to run or install without it. This is called the system management controller, and in effect is a glorified fan controller amongst other things. Practically speaking, this is the reason, outside of some other specific things that might be different – such as video card firmware for video cards and OS X specific drivers for various things (sound cards come to mind) that you can’t ‘just’ boot a vanilla copy of OS X right on your beige box pc. Of course, this isn’t that hard to get around, which is why your average OS X hosted VM host can run OS X VMs, and there are Hackintosh distros floating around.
Most Hackintosh install methods these days use variations of boot132, a bootloader that was provided when Apple was transitioning from PPC to Intel with some modifications. The original bootloader was open source, and built with some changes for Darwin. As an aside, there have been some attempts to repackage Darwin as an open source OS.
Apple supports a limited range of hardware you know will work. Otherwise, you’re going to have to scrounge up tested hardware or hack hardware into working. This is what makes running OS X on commodity hardware difficult. The SMC is relatively trivial to get around. Getting your unsupported sound chip (nothing like having your mic stuck at maximum volume on a laptop to ruin your day), video adaptor, and other hardware is the tricky part. If you have an AMD processor, for example, the stock kernel will take one look at it and panic like a mouse ran up its pants. In many cases, the solution ends up being building a new kernel, with patches off Darwin source (which is FOSS) and using that.
In short, the big problem isn’t the magic chip, it is OS X needing to play nice with the entire system.
Comme vous pouvez le constater, s’il n’est peut-être pas facile d’installer OS X sur un PC, c’est faisable. Vous souhaitez construire votre propre PC Hackintosh? Alors, assurez-vous de lire nos formidables guides ici:
Le guide geek du hackintoshing - Partie 1: Notions fondamentales
Le guide geek du hackintoshing - Partie 2: L'installation
Le guide geek de hackintoshing - Partie 3: Mise à niveau vers Lion et double amorçage
Avez-vous quelque chose à ajouter à l'explication? Sound off dans les commentaires. Voulez-vous lire plus de réponses d'autres utilisateurs de Stack Exchange doués en technologie? Découvrez le fil de discussion complet ici.
