Compound WireCOMPOUND31 August 2026
darwin-vm
REAL IOS AND MACOS IN QEMU
darwin-vm boots real iOS/macOS in QEMU
jprx/darwin-vm runs iOS and macOS under QEMU: virtual iPhone 17 back down to the 12, and M1 through M5 Apple Silicon Macs.
Apple's Simulator has never emulated an iPhone. It runs your app compiled for the Mac against a macOS-hosted runtime, so nothing underneath your own code is the real thing. No iOS kernel, no boot chain, no device firmware. Emulating the machine in QEMU gives you exactly the layer the Simulator was built to hide, which is why this has mostly existed as private tooling inside security research rather than as something you could clone. Now it is a public Python repo.
https://github.com/jprx/darwin-vm
#dev
What each account said
jprx/darwin-vm boots real iOS and macOS in QEMU: virtual iPhone 17 back to 12, and M1 through M5 Macs. Not the Simulator, which runs your app against macOS frameworks. This is the actual OS, on a version you own no hardware for. https://github.com/jprx/darwin-vm #software
jprx/darwin-vm runs iOS and macOS under QEMU, with virtual iPhone 12 through 17 and M1 through M5 Apple Silicon Macs. Emulating Apple Silicon well enough to boot a modern iPhone image puts iOS work on machines Apple never shipped it to, and puts the boot chain under a debugger. #TechBluesky