Software engineer Georges Gagnerot has successfully run iOS on a virtual machine, emulating the Apple Silicon GPU to achieve the feat, which is normally impossible.
To achieve the workaround, Gagnerot had to jailbreak the iOS, which allowed software rendering, as well as patch the emulator to run on the ARM processor, which is used in most iOS devices.
Although he was able to use software rendering, some apps still do not work because they use direct Metal or OpenGL calls, which exploit the GPU directly and will not work on virtualised hardware.
The next step in Gagnerot’s project is to forward GPU calls to a real device, which he hopes to achieve in the future.
This move has many security implications, particularly in terms of checking the security of iOS.
