Kernel

The kernel of iOS is the. Pre-2.0, it was vulnerable to the Ramdisk Hack and may still be, but iBoot doesn't allow boot-args to be passed anymore. It is mapped to memory at 0xC0000000. On startup, the kernelcache is decompressed and run.

On production devices, the kernel is always stored as a pre-linked kernelcache stored at /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kernelcaches/kernelcache. On development devices the kernel is stored in its normal place, at /mach_kernel.