How to install Apple iOS on qemu

Question

Qemu supports ARM (and many other platforms). So, what do I need (besides installation media) to install Apple iOS on qemu? Are there ways to create iOS image suitable for Qemu?

Update:

Apple A4 = Cortex-A8 + PowerVR SGX535
Apple A5 = Cortex-A9 MPCore + PowerVR SGX543MP2

Both Cortexes use ARM v7 instruction set which is supported by Qemu. The problem is that:

• iOS doesn't support any of video-cards that can be emulated by Qemu
• Qemu can't emulate PowerVR GPU.

Solution 1

QEMU does not emulate Apple A4/A5 architecture.

Solution 2

there are libraries to emulate SGX

at http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/powervr-utilities.asp

maybe they can be used to make a hardware module for qemu

also there is some development that was doing on the gpu in the mailing list

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-10/msg02073.html

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https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/QemuOpenGLES

http://planet.linaro.org/tag/meego/

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https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/QemuOpenGLES

http://planet.linaro.org/tag/meego/

Solution 3

This is old, but still good question. I found new answer to it. Try qemu for iOS on github.

Comments

[Dawan]

There is no documentation on that. Have you been able to port that into qemu?

[Samuel Tulach]

This is really old github project without documentation, but it proves, that simulate ARM is possible.