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One large project I’ve spent large amounts of time working on was vma2pwn, a project that can create a fully modifiable vma2 macOS boot-chain for macOS guest virtual machines. This was actually a preliminary project to this one—in other words, figuring out how to walk before learning how to run. With recent developments such as the Mac transition to Apple silicon and Mac Catalyst, the iOS and macOS operating systems were brought much closer together than they ever have been before; with the introduction of macOS virtualization on Apple silicon Macs, this begged the question: could iOS (and the macOS boot-chain) be modified in such a way to virtualize it as well?

iOS on macOS? These are rather uncharted waters. vma2ios exists, but has not been (intentionally) publicized. Additionally, the macOS version of XNU and iBoot differs enough to require difficult modifications that result in only a partially-working solution.

I am not the first to embark on the topic on iOS virtualization/emulation. Here are some notable projects and companies that have approached this subject already that you may be interested in reading up on:

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