Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel | Hacker News Reader

Apple Open Sources iOS Kernel

github.com

104 pointstray523 comments

XNU has always been open source, but not the iOS specific changes. There have been private efforts to compile it for ARM, but this is now officially supported in the public Apple source code.

But is this compilable and usable for a bare iron iphone or mac? Or even vm?

No, because the bootrom only boots signed software. For an emulator, this could be very interesting; if the bootrom is reproduced and drivers are compatible, it could theoretically work.

Not in it's current state. It's just a kernel. It's missing key components of the software stack to even make it terminal-only, let alone a GUI. There have been attempts through the years to create a full OS from the bits of OS X/macOS that Apple drops on opensource.apple.com. They do this by surrounding the kernel with FreeBSD or GNU software land, porting Xorg, and other components. See DarwinBSD, OpenDarwin, and PureDarwin. None of the projects proved sustainable in the long-run. It is possible that could change now though with better access to the code on GitHub. It's also possible we could see better drivers developed for hackintosh.

I think this title is misleading. Apple has open XNU for more than 10 years. And AFAIK this kernel does not include ARM compiling option, as the very first paragraph in the README:

> XNU runs on I386, X86_64

There are people on Twitter saying ARM64 is available on opensource.apple.com but I can't seem to find it.

This guy works on Foundation: https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/913983607777116160

The README also mentions iOS, which AFAIK is only ARM.

There's also some ARM specific code: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu/tree/master/pexpert/arm

The Makefile also has ARM/ARM64 options.

That’s what's newsworthy here—the code now includes the ARM codepaths as well.

This should not be flagged. The title is correct. There is code specific to arm and arm64 in the repo, whereas previously the public source code releases were only i386 and amd64. Apple has open sourced the iOS kernel. Please unflag.

How long has this been a thing? This seems huge, but I don't spend enough time in the iOS ecosystem to tell if this is just how it's been for months/years

I'm pretty sure Darwin has been open source since forever - at least since 2003 according to Wiki. This is the first time I've seen it on GitHub rather than Apple's internal open source microsite (https://opensource.apple.com/)

This is correct. xnu/Darwin, libDispatch, the Objective-C runtime, and many other components have been on opensource.apple.com for years.

This only dropped 2 days ago

Hey so that was my first reaction, and then I thought better of it -- there's no way something this big could happen and not send ripples through the hacker (not cracker, hacker)/programmer/tech community.

It's been on opensource.apple.com for a decade. This Github repo is just a mirror.

The Mach kernel has been open source since it's inception IIRC. The Apple extensions are real, but not the majority of the functionality.

If they start taking PR's and merging in, that would be awesome. I'm sure there's lots to be optimized and improved.

> If they start taking PR's

It’s a mirror.

Perhaps this could have something to do with the rumors of ARM Macbooks?

Likely.

Title should be "Apple now has a mirror of XNU kernel on Github"

Why is this flagged?

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