There were already some reimplementations of PalmOS on top of other operating systems. e.g. PalmOS's own "Simulator" was a reimplentation of PalmOS on Windows.

There were already some reimplementations of PalmOS on top of other operating systems. e.g. PalmOS's own "Simulator" was a reimplentation of PalmOS on Windows. It would contain a x86 ROM that would "thunk out" for some ROM libraries (including the DAL) into separate .dlls that would do the equivalent Windows calls. I always though that if I ever wanted to start my own PalmOS clone I would start by looking at those. Garnet VM by ACCESS was exactly the same thing except for Linux and Gtk+, and compiled for ARM. Namely, an original PalmOS ROM blob with some libraries implemented as external .so that would perform Gtk+ and Cairo (!!) calls. Most probably, this was actually developed as part of the entire "PalmOS on top of Linux" project that PalmSource actually still had when they were bought by ACCESS. StyleTap was a 3rd party commercial reimplementation. You can see it still has some drawing glitches and differences versus an actual PalmOS. It is available for both Windows (CE) and Linux (Android). So I think Linux does make for an excellent host operating system, after all.