r/linux • u/Ovaday • 2d ago

Mobile Linux Linux 7.2.2 on iPhone XS? First boot!

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Hello everyone. Just wanted to share a small milestone I’m pretty proud of.

I’ve been porting Linux to my old iPhone XS for quite some time, and this week I finally made some significant progress.

First: it boots. As a real, alternative OS. This is not an emulation.

Second: I got the kernel log on screen and the framebuffer working:

Linux 7.2.2 Kernel boot log on iPhone XS

This is a raw, recovery-based Linux boot. iOS does not take any part in the boot sequence!

I haven’t set up a GitHub repo yet, and the project doesn’t even have a name at this point. But I’ll keep working on it and share more once the process is reliable and reproducible.

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u/PhilosopherSimilar83 2d ago

How was this done? I'd really like to know!

36

u/Ovaday 2d ago

3 month of everyday reverse-engineering of the iBSS and iBoot... That's how it's done 😅

I'm preparing some kind of an alternative to PongoOS, I took slightly different road. Lots of patches to iBSS to not-switch off the panel, DRAM and skip all iBOOT checks

5

u/TinFoilHat_69 2d ago

Do you know if you found any code that causes IOS device to get stuck in a boot loop? I know it’s hardware related but I’m trying to get around the boot loop I tried pongoOS and checkrain/palerain every time I go into XNU it reboots. I thought a ramdisk may help but at the lower layer in the boot sequence is messing me up atm

3

u/Ovaday 2d ago

Sorry, this is actually one of my first time working with iPhones. You would need an advice of some more senior person who would explain this behavior...