Enthusiasts were able to successfully boot the Linux 5.18 kernel on Apple iPads based on A7 and A8 ARM chips. Work is currently limited to adapting Linux for iPad Air, iPad Air 2 and some iPad mini devices, but there are no fundamental problems for applying developments to other devices based on Apple A7 and A8 chips, such as iPhone 5S and HomePod, released in 2013- 2014. For newer devices, builds from the Sandcastle project can be used.
The Checkm8 vulnerability is used to unlock the bootloader and bypass firmware verification (Jailbreak). In its current form, development is still at an early stage, in which kernel loading is supported, graphics acceleration, network functions and sound work, but USB and Bluetooth do not work yet. The next goal of the project is to provide a bootable user environment based on the postmarketOS distribution built on the Alpine Linux package base, the Musl standard C library and the BusyBox utility set.
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