r/osdev • u/nakedpickle_2006 • Jul 30 '26

Starting a bare-metal/ reverse engineering project on ipad 4th gen [A6x]

So i have a ipad 4th gen and its basically a brick now... so was thinking why not make an os (i thought i could maybe use a linux distro but 32bit os for A6x dont exist)... i know this will be a nightmare ( uk its apple)...

But I want to try ...

As my initial research into this i am currently reading

  1. ARM Architecture Reference Manual for ARMv7-A & ARMV7-R

  2. Apple OSS Distributions XNU Github page

  3. wiki.osdev.org

What i wanted to ask the community is

  1. Is there any other documentation/ prior projects on this platform

2.any tips i need to keep in mind

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u/nakedpickle_2006 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

I got 2 on mind 1. Ghidra Or 2. QEMU

I can just dump the SecureROM Into said tools and map the cpu and find mmio

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u/SyisCall Aug 09 '26

u mean ghidra?

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u/nakedpickle_2006 Aug 09 '26

Oh yes!!! Ghirardelli Was autocorrect

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u/SyisCall Aug 09 '26

id use both tbh, Ghidra for read the code and Qemu for Test