iOS emulated in QEMU with:
• Restore / Boot
• Software rendering
• Kernel and userspace debugging
• Pairing with the host
• Serial / SSH access
• Multitouch
• Network
• Install and run any arbitrary IPA
The eShard thing and this GitHub are fairly different, as far as I know.
The eShard people found an earlier version of this repository and set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator.
Meanwhile, the actual emulator has been advancing, arguably more quickly than the eShard patch set.
The current set of patches needed for the latest commits on this repo to run iOS are less than 10 instructions, all to enable the software-rendering/framebuffer fallback code path instead of trying to use display drivers.
but really nothing too extensive or hard to port. It’s mostly flipping various can_has_debug returns, bypassing sigcheck, and the classic patch to flip launchd into research device mode.
> set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator
You don’t say! They’ve hacked the whole process and it feels extremely brittle. Like there’s no chance they can sustainably port this to another version of the software, let alone hardware.
This is incredibly impressive—booting an iPhone 11 all the way to Springboard in QEMU is no small feat. Kudos to the ChefKissInc team and everyone who’s contributed to getting this far!
This is the ultimate emulation hack bar none - congrats to everyone involved. This also bodes well for the hackintosh project. It's may no longer be a dead end (though miles away), and eventually we might even see efficient emulation as ARM PCs become generally available.
Just to expand a bit on the sibling comment, IPAs downloaded from the App Store are encrypted with a DRM scheme with a key tied to the Apple account. The binaries actually stay encrypted on-disk and the OS has facilities to transparently decrypt them when executed. The usual way of decrypting is to actually execute the app, attach a debugger (normally not possible for production apps) and read the decrypted code from memory.
trollstore is an inofficial app store for iOS devices which does not require a jailbreak. There are also apps that seem to decrypt the encrypted IPA (which is the file format of an iOS app) so you can view the decrypted app code and the resources. it's kinda the same as decompiling a android java app.
There is still no proper documentation for using qemu on windows host, the options and arguments etc. We have to google and the info and ideas that are scattered across the internet, or referencing the Linux equivalents of it to come up with a solution
to be fair most folks playing around with qemu are probably running unix. windows has plenty of user friendly virtualization options (virtualbox, vmware, hyper-v), not to mention WSL. so windows users would probably only run qemu in hyperspecific cases like this
nope, not fair, virtualbox for example doesn't use whpx on windows while it has kvm backend on linux now
vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution
and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI
Seems like the important part would be emulating the security crap so it can be understood and bypassed. Where is this with that set of things? (being able to run things like banking/DMV emulated would be the killer feature)
What makes it your favourite model specifically? I can’t really notice a lot of differences between them and I’ve used multiple devices the last 3 years.
Related (mentions this repo): Emulating an iPhone in QEMU (268 points, 2 months ago, 64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43592409
The eShard people found an earlier version of this repository and set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator.
Meanwhile, the actual emulator has been advancing, arguably more quickly than the eShard patch set.
The current set of patches needed for the latest commits on this repo to run iOS are less than 10 instructions, all to enable the software-rendering/framebuffer fallback code path instead of trying to use display drivers.
https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/wiki/Filesys...
https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/blob/6eff3ab...
but really nothing too extensive or hard to port. It’s mostly flipping various can_has_debug returns, bypassing sigcheck, and the classic patch to flip launchd into research device mode.
You don’t say! They’ve hacked the whole process and it feels extremely brittle. Like there’s no chance they can sustainably port this to another version of the software, let alone hardware.
vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution
and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI
Qemu-system-m68k to run Mac OS 7-8 - https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=37&sid=6a9...
PPC emulation works fine though.