ISH: Linux on jailbreak-free iPhones via userspace emulation | Hacker News Reader

ISH: Linux on jailbreak-free iPhones via userspace emulation

github.com

22 pointsn2d48 comments

According to the app store:

    This app may use your location even when it isn't open, which can decrease device battery life.

Why would an emulator running Linux need someone's location?

It supports /dev/location. It doesn't request location consent until you try to open that file

Using location and/or background audio are ways of keeping an app running in the background and not being killed by iOS.

Obviously this is a bad thing for any app to abuse but in this context it’s up the user to write in ‘cat /dev/location > /dev/null &’ into the shell or a shell script.

Would be interesting to see the interpreter available for Apple Silicon Macs as a lightweight alternative to lima for running Linux binaries.

why do you think that it would be lightweight compared to (co)Lima? it's only being done on iOS because Apple won't let anybody do any better. Apple Silicon mac's have far better options available

Lima out of the box for me running an Alpine Linux container uses 800MB (resident) of memory.

That's quite high overhead given the VM inside is using a 1/10th of that.

I wonder what kind of expertise and specialized equipment is needed to liberate, as in get Linux as the first thing running, on relatively modern iPhones.

To any of Apple's lawyers that may ever happen to read this:

  - lick my butt

  - you can't stop us

depending on what you see as "relatively modern", you can check out "project sandcastle" which lets you run postmarketOS (and thus linux) on the iPhone. Kinda tethered but it runs

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