Currently Fawkes runs on Linux and FreeBSD. An effort should be made to allow Fawkes to be compiled and used on Mac OS X. A few developers use Mac laptops and a port would allow to work with Fawkes in the native environment. Another reason for a Mac OS X port is to support the South African rescue robot, which uses a Mac Mini as on-board computer. Mac OS X is however not considered to be a primary platform.

A first patch exists which has been used on OS X 10.4 to compile at least the core library. This patch needs more work to be usable on 10.5.

A major obstacle at the moment is the lack of the source code of the ipcs command on Mac OS X. This console tool enumerates and shows all shared memory segments. This enumeration is required by Fawkes' libutils to scan for existing shared memory segments of a specific type. Linux and FreeBSD allow access to the enumeration used in the kernel of the OS. It is unknown how this can be achieved on Mac OS X at this moment. A workaround is to use a scratch file that stores all existing shared memory segments (for example by using SQLite, to gain transaction safety etc.) and query this file and check the mentioned segments.

Since compilation failed at such an early state it is unknown which other problems arise and if there are any new runtime problems which need to be adressed. This ticket should be updated with new findings as they become known.