Emulating IPhone On QEMU – Hackaday

🔍 Summary:

Georges Gagnerot has embarked on an ambitious project to emulate iOS and run iPhone software in a virtual environment using a patched version of QEMU, specifically the qemu-t8030. His efforts involve basic jailbreaking techniques to overcome the absence of the Apple Silicon GPU in the virtual setup. While older iOS versions allowed for software rendering, newer versions do not, prompting Gagnerot to patch the system to enable this feature. Despite this workaround, applications that rely directly on Metal or OpenGL still pose challenges.

Gagnerot is considering a future exploration of forwarding GPU calls to an actual device, although this task appears complex and is on hold for now. His project, detailed on GitHub under the t8030 code, showcases significant detective work and progress in the realm of iPhone software emulation, a task typically reserved for hardware hacking.

The context of this project is clarified by the fact that it is hosted on a site associated with a security firm focused on investigating iPhone security, including system software. This explains the extreme measures taken to make the system work, such as patching binaries. With developments like Asahi Linux creating drivers for Apple GPU, there might be potential to use this information for Apple GPU emulation in the future.

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📌 Source: https://hackaday.com/2025/04/06/emulating-iphone-on-qemu/