iPhone crash report gives insight into iPhone software
So, I’ve already managed to “crash” the iPhone, but of course since it runs “OS X” with protected memory and all that fun stuff (and this wasn’t a kernel panic), the crash consisted of Safari closing and returning to the home screen, not completely freezing like my RAZR always did whenever I would try to enter text without putting a space between each letter. I would have to s e n d t e x t m e s s a g e s l i k e t h i s).
The next time I synced, iTunes prompted me for permission to submit a crash report to Apple, and also provided me with the location of the crash report:
/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/iPhone name/
It looks pretty much like any standard Mac OS X crash report, with some basic OS info along with stack traces for each thread, which thread crashed, CPU register values, and binary image information.
Here’s what I’ve gotten out of it:
- Apple is calling iPhone’s operating system “OS X 1.0″… no big surprise
- iPhone’s Safari is called “MobileSafari”
- The home screen is called “SpringBoard”
- MobileSafari was process 98 (pretty much meaningless), while SpringBoard was process 15 (compared to Mac OS X’s equivalent, WindowServer, which is process 73 on my Mac).. this gives us an idea of how many processes are running
- There a bunch of new frameworks we’ve never heard of (including Celestial, MobileBluetooth, IOMobileFramebuffer, CoreSurface, CoreTelephony, numerous others, and liblockdown which sounds rather ominous and intriguing…)
- …as well as a bunch that we know and love (including Foundation, CoreAudio, CoreVideo, CoreGraphics, IOKit, WeKit, WebCore, JavaScriptCore, CFNetwork, and actually LayerKit which is now known as our friend CoreAnimation)
- Noticeably absent is AppKit (no big surprise, since very few UI elements look like Cocoa’s), but in it’s place appears to be UIKit.
- The filesystem structure looks similar to Mac OS X (/Applications, /System/Library/Frameworks, etc)
- iPhone most definitely runs on an ARM processor, but we already knew that
- It crashed in WebCore
Some of this makes me think that Apple simply isn’t ready to release an external Cocoa API to the public. Things like LayerKit would need to be changed to CoreAnimation, and UIKit would probably be given a different name, among others. And of course Apple would have to decide on a stable set of APIs before releasing it to 3rd party developers, wheras right now if they need to change something, they have complete control and can do whatever they like.
Update: John Gruber, Martin Gordon, and an empegbbs.com forum member have also posted crash logs, from MobileMail, Preferences, and MobilePhone respectively. They appear to be similar to my crash log, but below I have aggregated and sorted all the referenced Frameworks:
Applications:
- Preferences
- MobileMail
- MobilePhone
- MobileSafari
Libraries (existing):
- AddressBook
- AppSupport
- AudioToolbox
- CFNetwork
- CoreAudio
- CoreFoundation
- CoreGraphics
- CoreVideo
- Foundation
- IOKit
- JavaScriptCore
- LayerKit – now known as CoreAnimation
- SystemConfiguration
- WebCore
- WebKit
- dyld – dynamic link editor
- libSystem.B.dylib
- libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib
- libgcc_s_v6.1.dylib
- libiconv.2.dylib
- libicucore.A.dylib
- libobjc.A.dylib
- libsqlite3.0.dylib
- libssl.0.9.7.dylib
- libstdc++.6.dylib
- libxml2.2.dylib
- libz.1.dylib
Libraries (new):
- AddressBookUI
- AirPortSettings (Preferences only)
- BluetoothManager (only when Bluetooth is enabled?)
- Calendar (Preferences only)
- Celestial
- CoreSurface
- CoreTelephony
- GraphicsServices
- IAP (Preferences only)
- IOMobileFramebuffer
- ITSync
- MBX2D
- MBXConnect
- MeCCA
- Message
- MessageUI
- MobileBluetooth
- MobileMailSettings (Preferences only)
- MobileMusicPlayer (Preferences only)
- MusicLibrary (Preferences only)
- OpenGLES (Preferences only)
- Security
- TelephonyUI (MobilePhone and Preferences only)
- UIKit
- URLify
- libIOAudio2User.dylib
- liblockdown.dylib
And finally, what we know about the filesystem:
/Applications/MobileMail.app/MobileMail /Applications/MobilePhone.app/MobilePhone /Applications/MobileSafari.app/MobileSafari /Applications/Preferences.app/Preferences /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBook.framework/AddressBook /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBookUI.framework/AddressBookUI /System/Library/Frameworks/AppSupport.framework/AppSupport /System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/AudioToolbox /System/Library/Frameworks/BluetoothManager.framework/BluetoothManager /System/Library/Frameworks/CFNetwork.framework/CFNetwork /System/Library/Frameworks/Calendar.framework/Calendar /System/Library/Frameworks/Celestial.framework/Celestial /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/CoreAudio /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/CoreFoundation /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/CoreGraphics /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreSurface.framework/CoreSurface /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/CoreTelephony /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreVideo.framework/CoreVideo /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Foundation /System/Library/Frameworks/GraphicsServices.framework/GraphicsServices /System/Library/Frameworks/IAP.framework/IAP /System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework/Versions/A/IOKit /System/Library/Frameworks/IOMobileFramebuffer.framework/IOMobileFramebuffer /System/Library/Frameworks/ITSync.framework/ITSync /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/JavaScriptCore /System/Library/Frameworks/LayerKit.framework/LayerKit /System/Library/Frameworks/MBX2D.framework/MBX2D /System/Library/Frameworks/MBXConnect.framework/MBXConnect /System/Library/Frameworks/MeCCA.framework/MeCCA /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Message /System/Library/Frameworks/MessageUI.framework/MessageUI /System/Library/Frameworks/MobileBluetooth.framework/MobileBluetooth /System/Library/Frameworks/MobileMusicPlayer.framework/MobileMusicPlayer /System/Library/Frameworks/MusicLibrary.framework/MusicLibrary /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGLES.framework/OpenGLES /System/Library/Frameworks/Preferences.framework/Preferences /System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Security /System/Library/Frameworks/SystemConfiguration.framework/SystemConfiguration /System/Library/Frameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/TelephonyUI /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/UIKit /System/Library/Frameworks/URLify.framework/URLify /System/Library/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/WebCore /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/WebKit /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/AirPortSettings.bundle/AirPortSettings /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/MobileMailSettings.bundle/MobileMailSettings /usr/lib/dyld /usr/lib/libIOAudio2User.dylib /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib /usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib /usr/lib/libgcc_s_v6.1.dylib /usr/lib/libiconv.2.dylib /usr/lib/libicucore.A.dylib /usr/lib/liblockdown.dylib /usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib /usr/lib/libsqlite3.0.dylib /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.7.dylib /usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib
Anyone care to guess what some of these do?
Update #2: Well, this pretty blows away everything mentioned in this post. It’s a complete listing of all the files on the iPhone’s filesystem. These guys have already figured out how to activate (and deactivate) the iPhone, and appear to be getting pretty close to completely hacking the iPhone to run arbitrary code and possibly unlock it. Exciting stuff.