Oliver Haslam·

Download: iOS 12 And macOS 10.14 Source Code Finally Released By Apple

You may not be aware, but Apple generally releases the source kernel of macOS and iOS after each major release, and now iOS 12 and macOS 12.14’s release is now available for download.

If you’re of a mind to do so, you can now download the kernel from Apple and poke around, and while it’s not going to let anyone compile their very own build of iOS or macOS, the release of the Darwin kernel does allow Apple to return something to the open source community.

After all, there’s plenty of macOS and iOS that was originally open source if you follow it all the way back to their roots.

Apple explains the XNU kernel as:

XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use in OS X and iOS operating systems. XNU is an acronym for XNU is Not Unix. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD and C++ API for writing drivers called IOKit. XNU runs on I386, X86_64 for both single processor and multi-processor configurations.

Of course, these releases do give one group of people a unique look at what goes in under the hood of iOS and macOS – jailbreakers. This release of the iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 XNU source code will potentially give those people an added boost, allowing them to get closer to a viable iOS 12.x jailbreak for the masses. It’s early days in that regard though, so don’t expect anything too soon.

This source code release is a good place to start, though. You can download it right now from here.

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