Hacker Gets Fedora 36 Running in Virtual Machine on iPhone 12

A creative hacker managed to boot Fedora 36 in a virtual machine on an iPhone 12. He succeeded by unlocking the virtualization of the A14 chip via a jailbreak. And is it stable? No, not that again.

Hacker Zhuowei Zhang describes in a blog post how he managed to boot the Arm64 distro Fedora 36 on an iPhone 12 running iOS 14.1. He does that with a virtual machine, specifically UTM† Zhang describes how he uses an iPhone 12 that uses the A14 chip. It supports virtualization, but to get started with it, he had to jailbreak the phone first. The VM that can then run can only use a maximum of 900MB of memory.

Zhang had to unlock Hypervisor.framework with the jailbreak. He used for that fugu 14, an untethered jailbreak for iOS 14, which he still had to adjust to address kernel functions. According to Zhang, that kernel unlock can also be used on other iOS versions supported by Fugu 14. The tweak should also work on iOS devices with the M1 chip, specifically the iPad Pro and iPad Air. Even any other jailbreak works for that, because those devices already support Hypervisor.

The tweaker immediately admits that his hack does not work properly. “Is it practical? No, absolutely not,” he writes. Specifically, there is the problem that VMs on iOS can only use up to 900MB of memory. If the software goes over that, the phone will crash. The operating system works, but Zhang can’t do much with it. It certainly doesn’t run Crysis. “Believe me, I’ve tried,” he says.