▲iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU(github.com)
350 points by 71bw 1 day ago | 12 comments
▲gnabgib 1 day ago
Discussion on upstream repo (356 points, 2022, 144 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30545425

Related (mentions this repo): Emulating an iPhone in QEMU (268 points, 2 months ago, 64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43592409

▲msgodel 1 day ago
Looking at the issue tracker it sounds like they've made significant progress since then.
▲walterbell 22 hours ago
Progress update, https://eshard.com/posts/emulating-ios-14-with-qemu-part2

  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
In other news, Cellebrite acquired Corellium iOS/Android virtualization for $170M, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221982
▲bri3d 19 hours ago
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.

https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/wiki/Filesys...

▲bri3d 4 hours ago
In the interest of completeness I looked deeper and there are a few more patches to the kernel and SEP OS done at emulation time:

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.

▲ 1 hour ago
▲sheepscreek 6 hours ago
> 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.

▲walterbell 11 hours ago
Thanks for the wiki pointer.
▲throwaway48476 21 hours ago
Presumably to build a exploit test framework.
▲jeswin 16 hours ago
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.
▲storus 14 hours ago
ARM is not an open platform like IBM PC was. See Android phones and their custom Linux kernels with undocumented parts...
▲hiimwavy 8 hours ago
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!
▲msgodel 1 day ago
Woah this sounds like it boots all the way to Springboard at least! That's pretty huge!
▲ewuhic 1 day ago
Does it support trollstore with ability to decrypt IPAs?
▲mywittyname 23 hours ago
For the ignorant: what does this mean?
▲watusername 20 hours ago
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.
▲tom1337 23 hours ago
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.
▲skvmb 1 day ago
Came here to ask this very question. This would be killer if so!
▲xvilka 9 hours ago
They should try to push it upstream, at least partially. Otherwise it's doomed to die like previous attempts.
▲tifa2up 6 hours ago
Noob question: can you install iOS apps using this?
▲VMtest 11 hours ago
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
▲Liquix 10 hours ago
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
▲dd_xplore 18 hours ago
Is it emulating iOS? Or only running iOS binaries? Why does it specifically say iPhone 11?
▲dadoum 25 minutes ago
It's emulating iPhone 11's hardware. It runs iOS 14 and sepOS (Apple Security Enclave's firmware) on top.
▲worldsavior 18 hours ago
Probably because it's iPhone 11 binaries.
▲anthk 22 hours ago
How does Qemu m68k work for Classic Mac BTW?
▲lioeters 21 hours ago
It works. Technical discussions on running classic Macintosh with Qemu m68k:

Qemu-system-m68k to run Mac OS 7-8 - https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=37&sid=6a9...

▲LeoPanthera 21 hours ago
Not great. Use Mini vMac instead.

PPC emulation works fine though.

▲seany 12 hours ago
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)
▲startyz 10 hours ago
cool it is my favorite model of iphones.
▲Minks 6 hours ago
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.