“In 2010, Apple’s Platform Technologies Group (a subdivision of the CoreOS department) spent some time working on a project to port the Mac OS X Darwin kernel to the ARMv5 chipset architecture — the same family of chipsets that currently powers iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad,” Jack Perry reports for iMore.

“While iOS also uses the Darwin kernel, this project involved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and was left for the CoreOS teams to continue,” Perry reports. “Since Mac OX X 10.7 Lion has since shipped, as have newer generations of iPad and MacBook Air, without any sign of Mac OS X on ARM, it’s unknown if this project is still ongoing or has since been put on the shelf. However, the author of the paper [a Delfte University of Technology alum] is now a full-time employee at Apple, working as a CoreOS Engineer.”

Perry reports, “Mac OS X once ran on Power PC chips, yet Apple had it secretly running on Intel chips at the same time. It only makes sense for a company as forward thinking as Apple to have ARM-compatible builds of OS X in the development labs. So while neither an OS X tablet nor an ARM MacBook Air seem likely, it’s interesting to see further evidence of Apple keeping the Mac platform nimble.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Attribution: AppleInsider. Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Fred Mertz" and "Lynn Weiler" for the heads up.]