Developer ports iOS core to non-Apple hardware

[bsimpson]

Misleading title - this is just Darwin. There doesn't appear to be anything iOS specific in this announcement.

[DHowett]

Insofar as one could consider the kernel to be the core of an operating system, this (specifically, XNU on ARM) is the core of iOS. Having the Darwin userland atop that is simply icing on the proverbial cake.

What would you consider the core? Is it UIKit? Cocoa? libc? SpringBoard (the homescreen application)?

(Edited: s/Darwin/XNU/; thanks shibby!)

[lloeki]

I'm always happy to see open work happening on Darwin. I wish I could easily install an open Darwin OS as viable as say, ArchLinux alongside OSX, so that it maintains the same benefits such as energy usage, and dtrace, and whatnot. My dream: a BSD/Darwin with a lightweight accelerated framebuffer compositor such as Wayland.

[winocm]

I wish more people worked on Darwin based OSes.

[clarky07]

Personally I'd much rather see android on iPhone hardware than the other way around. Cool project though.

[ihuman]

If you have an iPhone 3G, you can already do this. It's not very good, though. http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/OpeniBoot

[billyjobob]

On the desktop we can install OS X on non-Apple hardware to make Hackintoshes. So far this is just a kernel port with no graphics, but will it lead to installing iOS on non-Apple phones in a similar way? 'iClones'?

[garretruh]

Hackintoshes are largely possible because it's possible to get almost the same components used in Macs on regular PCs. It might be a little more difficult to get your hands on the chips Apple uses in iPhones/iPads (not to mention cobbling them together). Not that doing so wouldn't be pretty awesome.

[protomyth]

No, this is Darwin which is the open source part of iOS / OS X. I would imagine iOS looks for some pretty specific set of things from the chipset it is running on and there is no "generic ARM phone".

[fsiefken]

that's quite an achievement and great news! But looking at it from a more practical viewpoint; why run darwin if you can run linux on arm and phones already? Even on iOS itself, with a jailbroken phone you can ssh into the underlying OS and execute arm binaries through the shell. I can imagine it's a stepping stone towards running iOS in QEMU for running apps on your desktop or tablet, which is nice as I could run my bought Eclipse, Tigris and Tikal boardgames on my desktop. I am not sure if I'd break the EULA in that scenario.

[winocm]

Not every phone has a jailbreak available for it. Plus, you're still stuck with an effectively sandboxed kernel. You can't fix any bugs or implement any kernel level drivers, for example.

If I need a new IOKit driver class, I simply build the kext and use `kextload`, or I can just prelink it into the kernelcache.

[monological]

How difficult would it be to get the userland working on top of this? Is it even possible, given the hardware differences?

[sleepyK]

No, it's probably not possible, as iOS is coded to run on specific Apple manufactured hardware...

Even if it were possible, it would take a hellish amount of time to get working, I'm sure.

[eonil]

Interesting trial.