Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sudosysgen 1792 days ago
It would be possible, though very difficult, to turn the OS into a staging bootloader, and load another OS bare-metal from there. Still insanely difficult though.
2 comments

Usually, once you can run code in kernel mode it’s just a matter of bringing the hardware back to a sane state.

Unfortunately, “just” running code in kernel mode is incredibly hard on the iPad. There’s e.g. a hardware mitigation that turns a memory region to read-only and also only allows kernel code to run from this region. This mitigation is locked down and cannot be disabled once XNU is running on the iPad (http://siguza.github.io/KTRR/).

On top of that page tables are also protected by a “kernel within the kernel” (https://blog.svenpeter.dev/posts/m1_sprr_gxf)

Getting past all that is going to be very hard if not impossible.

I thought the first-generation iPad pro was checkra1n-compatible? Isn't checkm8 a bootloader exploit?
Yes the first gen iPad Pro can, and the second generation one too. The target user base for Linux on those might be too small though.