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Linux Kernel and Bootloader Ported to the iPhone

REVENGE

By REVENGE

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It was said from the beginning: "it is only a matter of time." A team of developers have now successfully ported the Linux 2.6 kernel to run on the iPhone, along with a new bootloader called openiboot that is capable of booting both Linux and the iPhone OS.

 

From the Linux on iPhone blog:

"What we have:

 

- Framebuffer driver

- Serial driver

- Serial over USB driver

- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

 

What we have in openiboot (but hasn't been ported yet):

 

- Read-only support for the NAND

 

What we don't have (yet!):

 

- Write support for the NAND

- Wireless networking

- Touchscreen

- Sound

- Accelerometer

- Baseband support

 

The current userland we're using, in the interest of expedience, is a Busybox installation created with buildroot, but glibc works fine as well, and we're going to build a more permanent userland solution."

A video has been submitted to vimeo demonstrating the functionality of openiboot and the process of booting Linux.

 

Instructions for installing this preliminary version of openiboot and/or the Linux kernel are available, but currently require a Linux console to execute.

 

The necessary files may be downloaded from here.

 

Congratulations to leader planetbeing and contributors CPICH, cmw, poorlad, ius, and saurik for this fundamentally important achievement!

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(MoC)
Awesome! We are now living in the shadow of iPhone's running OS X and a Linux distro very soon (please let it be Debian first!)

 

Eww. Get a minimal installation of Gentoo on there and you'll be fine. Anyway, it would still be a hell of a lot of time until any GUI runs. :)

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FadeFX

hi guys, sorry for this maybe dumb question, but i did not actually follow that kind of iphone news, do not eaven have one, but is it that the iphone has a similar encrypted firmware like the newer ipods have? just interested if, because i use rockbox on my ipod nano 1st gen and since my girlfriend uses a nano 2nd gen what already has encrypted firmware wich makes it impossible to install rockbox on it. if it is, i could imagine a lot of people interrested in how u got round this at www.rockbox.org to build a port for this and other newer aplle targets...

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kulos
Next they'll be trying to run Linux on a Satnav or something...

 

And with SatNav you mean a GPS navigation device like TomTom?? Tomtoms (and I guess a lot of others) already run Linux as default OS so ...

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iHack13

I dont want to annoy you, but since the post button is there to share opinions I'll just shoot.

 

I think it'd be much better if you remove the links for downloading. So the 'unexperienced users' ( regarding terminal and commands) don't even try to use this "developing but not finished project" on their phones.

 

As there is a risk that the whole thread will be flooded with "I bricked my iPhone"

 

Don't get me wrong, the links and advises on the frontpage look like, if it was a finished project and ready for download to all kind of users. It would be much nicer if you'd give a link for the interested guys, where they can find further information regarding download etc

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booger_sniffer5000
I dont want to annoy you, but since the post button is there to share opinions I'll just shoot.

 

I think it'd be much better if you remove the links for downloading. So the 'unexperienced users' ( regarding terminal and commands) don't even try to use this "developing but not finished project" on their phones.

 

As there is a risk that the whole thread will be flooded with "I bricked my iPhone"

 

Don't get me wrong, the links and advises on the frontpage look like, if it was a finished project and ready for download to all kind of users. It would be much nicer if you'd give a link for the interested guys, where they can find further information regarding download etc

 

I think we are pretty safe, the download link doesn't work anyways. :P

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