ish VS UTM

You can, with ish (https://ish.app). It is a bit slow though and doesn't support the newest releases. (Well and by default it runs Alpine instead of Debian)

On IOS, there is a emulator called ISH which looks great. I haven't tried personally though, I couldn't afford an iphone. I will be using Termux on android for the rest of the post.

I'm a happy daily iSH [1] user, it's an amazing technical project, but I really pine for the day when `apt get blah` will be a reality, using an app available from the official App Store. Be it a paid or free app. CLI only, or with graphics. For concreteness, let's say a Debian-based distro in your iPhone upon tapping Get on Apple's App Store, independently of your location. It is pretty sad that, if this ever comes to be, it will probably be the result of EU/DOJ forces, not of technological advancements.

When do you see this happening (options are number of years)?

[1] https://ish.app/

You can run iSH on the device for Linux (somewhat limited)

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

If you're curious, iSH's source is public: https://github.com/ish-app/ish

You're correct that there is no Linux kernel emulation. They went with reimplementation for that. However, the userland is very much emulated x86 binaries. You can even compile your own C code inside iSH and run it. When you syscall, control passes from the threaded code[0] interpreter into the Linux reimplementation.

The reason why they aren't shipping Debian is that the threaded code technique being used as a JIT substitute in both iSH and UTM SE is far too slow to run a full Debian derivative. Believe me, I tried installing Ubuntu on UTM SE and it took literal hours and flattened my iPad battery in the process. iSH uses Alpine Linux because it's very lightweight[1].

As far as I'm aware there's no secret deal with Apple to lock iSH down. The only limitations I've ran into have to do with MySQL, which wants unaligned atomics, which you can't do on ARM64 without compromising the performance of the emulator. I actually had a discussion with the developer of iSH about this and put in a PR to make MySQL stop crashing iSH.

[0] return-oriented programming

[1] So lightweight it doesn't even ship anything GNU, making it one of the few genuine "Linux distros" with no slash or plus or "I would just like to interject"

> in software side of Ipad IOS, that is the biggest innovation in years

That would be iSH, slow but functional Alpine Linux emulation for iOS.

https://ish.app

> Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it

After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.

Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to run macOS and Linux VMs.

In case others were similarly confused, I thought that UTM was commercial but it is Apache 2 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/blob/v4.6.5/LICENSE

UTM runs virtual machines on iOS and has been around a while: https://getutm.app

Issue is that Apple doesn’t allow apps to run JIT so if you want the JIT version of UTM, you need to sideload or Jailbreak. The non-JIT version is on the App Store.

> I would love to see an emulator that could run later OS versions like Tiger.

UTM.

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

> I wonder if there's a Termux equivalent for iPhone.

https://getutm.app

> These sources also pointed to Apple’s new iPad Pro models, which feature OLED screens, as evidence that an OLED screen alone isn’t enough to guarantee more sales. Several analyst forecasts have downgraded new iPad Pro shipments from 10 million units to six or seven million units.

OLED M4 iPad Pro won't sell until Apple enables virtualization.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/748130

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/discussions/3230

  iPads do launch the kernel in EL2, but they don’t enable the hypervisor.

I have that Magic Keyboard and would love to have the option to run real Linux via https://getutm.app/. The iPad is fully capable of this, but it is a pain because you have to jailbreak it. Ugh.