Announcing ios-linuxkit: Linux on iPad, the Hard Way

I’m done waiting for Apple to fix things. And one of the things I think should exist is a decent way to run Linux binaries on my iPad. And after almost six months messing about with ARM emulation in various forms, I can finally do something about it. ios-linuxkit running on my M1 iPad Pro Put bluntly, the lack of hypervisor support on iOS should be an embarrassment to Apple–an EUR 1400 iPad Pro with an M4 chip can’t run Docker, can’t run a VM, can’t do any of the things I do daily on an EUR 50 ARM board. Apple has the hardware support, the kernel entitlements, and has chosen to keep it locked away. ios-linuxkit is my answer to that, or at least as much of an answer as you can get without Apple’s cooperation. It’s a Linux runtime for iOS that provides a working AArch64 userland on iPhone and iPad–shells, compilers, package managers, language runtimes, the lot–without JIT, without RWX memory, without MAP_JIT, without any of the things Apple won’t let you have. The base is the ish-arm64…