Tips

The question that most people want to be answered is if this is the book to replace the venerable Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh. In my opinion it’s complementary with some good updates and interesting tips. I wasn’t expecting to buy this book so soon due to some Twitter comments and to printing issues, with at least one chapter missing and replaced with another from a ASP.net book. A project I’m working at antecipated my waiting....

I really like my non-unibody Macbook Pro (awesome keyboard!) but its 3GB ram limit makes it almost impossible to work with virtual machines, Mac OS VMs in particular. I don’t have a need for another laptop and possibilities were between buying a Mac Pro or build my own Hackintosh. Against the Hackintosh is the fact that my patience for small problems doesn’t exist anymore. I just want something that works and does what I need – time is money....

One obstacle that I faced long time ago and came again into spotlight is how to recompile GDB for iOS. It is not useful to fix the ARM disassembler and then not be able to compile. As far as I know there isn’t any documentation available or an easy method to accomplish this – Saurik’s build environment is not public (?) and Apple sources do not compile directly. Darwinbuild project works great for OS X but it’s a question mark for iOS....

This is just a simple post about using Xcode to create IDA C/C++ plugins. Nothing fancy here. For great references about IDA SDK plugin writing check out The IDA Pro Book by Chris Eagle and binarypool.com tutorial. Xcode 3.2.6 is the reference version used. The resulting project loads and compiles without any issues into Xcode 4. Why not doing this in 4? Human brain is misterious (3.x still loads by default on my system)....

Here it is a version I consider good enough to come out of draft status. I have added more information – one thing I was especially interested was to match the available operations in the SBPL syntax with the system/kernel functions that they control. This helps to better understand what is the impact of each operation. Appendix B features the lazy IDC script I used to extract this information from the sandbox kernel module (then I had to match with XNU kernel sources)....