iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU • Hacker News Board

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#31

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #30

bri3d wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#32

Post by dadoum » Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

dd_xplore wrote: post #16

Is it emulating iOS? Or only running iOS binaries? Why does it specifically say iPhone 11?

It's emulating iPhone 11's hardware. It runs iOS 14 and sepOS (Apple Security Enclave's firmware) on top.

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#33

Post by VMtest » Sat, Jun 14, 2025, 12:31 AM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #23

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

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

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#34

Post by yencabulator » Sat, Jun 14, 2025, 3:55 PM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #18

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.

"Ultimate" when it's barely emulating something that was released in 2019, discontinued in 2022, and the hardware vendor in question is likely to keep adding obstacles purely to mess with it?

Re: iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

#35

Post by skrauqs » Sat, Jun 14, 2025, 5:25 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…

eShard provided ChefKissInc with the whole patches like a year ago to show him what he had to do in order to have the UI working and sponsored its project with both hardware, financial support and knowledge. Both thing are really just different side of the same common goal. I got told that they have iOS 18 already working and 26 on the way, so probably that in a year or so QEMUAppleSilicon will also have that for everyone to use !