iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU • Hacker News Board

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#21

Post by walterbell » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #15

walterbell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Thanks for the wiki pointer.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#22

Post by VMtest » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 5:35 AM UTC

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

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#23

Post by Liquix » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 6:39 AM UTC

VMtest wrote: post #22

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

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#24

Post by startyz » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

cool it is my favorite model of iphones.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#25

Post by xvilka » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 7:23 AM UTC

They should try to push it upstream, at least partially. Otherwise it's doomed to die like previous attempts.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#26

Post by hiimwavy » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 8:36 AM UTC

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!

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#27

Post by sheepscreek » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #15

walterbell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> 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.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#28

Post by Minks » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

startyz wrote: post #24

cool it is my favorite model of iphones.

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.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#29

Post by tifa2up » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

Noob question: can you install iOS apps using this?

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#30

Post by bri3d » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #15

walterbell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.