iPad 2 Jailbreak JailbreakMe 3.0 to be a Lot Faster? Still No Release Date

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That elusive iPad 2 jailbreak that so many iPad 2 owners are waiting for has been the talk of the town for the past few days. A leaked image suggesting the new tool made by Comex would be launched on June 17 made the rounds of the Internet only to prove it wasn’t real, which is what most people expected.

Since then Comex has decided to further explain his progress on the iPad 2 jailbreak, and his intentions for the future of jailbreaks. Those of you interested in how this stuff works will certainly want to read his full quote, which, unlike his usual Twitter messages, is a lot longer:

If you don’t know, the stashing approach jailbreaks have been using for years– Cydia’s “Reorganizing Filesystem”– involves moving some large directories from the small / partition into the large /var partition, then creating symlinks from the original to the new location. This both ensures that any additional stuff put in those directories by packages will end up in the /var partition, and frees up space on the / partition for files created outside of those directories. However, the process has some issues, like taking forever to do when you jailbreak (I am a bit fanatical about speed), pretty much requiring the jailbreak to reboot the system to ensure there aren’t any running applications pointing to the old files (ditto about speed, I want a jailbreak to not even require a respring, as in star, but since star used stashing, some obscure things could cause issues before a reboot), and seriously confusing the sandbox code in the kernel (because each application has a sandbox with a list of allowed filenames, but after the symlink has moved files, the filenames no longer match), requiring that code to be patched (it needs to be patched anyway these days because tweaks have to run under the sandboxes of the applications they’re hooking, but depend on accessing various directories; but it still feels good to get rid of a kludge).

With unionfs (which was saurik’s idea originally), new files are created in the /var partition, and merged with files in the corresponding directories in the / partition, so no files need to be moved, no descriptors are invalidated, and I think the sandbox code won’t notice what happened. It also opens the door for upgrading the base operating system without destroying the jailbreak files (although maybe iOS 5 delta updates will already allow this? I haven’t looked at them yet).

I’ve wanted to do this since literally a year ago (that’s the date of the nullfs checkin, since I was dumb and thought I wanted that instead of unionfs), but I never got around to making it work properly.

So, I just hope that I can get rid of the crashes my meddling with unionfs’s code have introduced, and fix it for the iPad 2 (my dumped copies of iPad 2 kernels do not include symbols; I wrote a small BinDiff-like tool to copy over symbols from a kernel for another device, but it’s not perfect) and that there aren’t any performance issues.

In short the jailbreak of the future will be a lot easier to perform and quite faster. Unfortunately though we can’t tell you when the iPad 2 jailbreak will be launched as Comex failed to reveal that. His intentions are clearly explained here, maybe too thoroughly, although Apple would probably be able to tell what Comex did from the moment the new tools becomes public, but there’s no telling if this new technique works, and there are no screenshots and/or videos to back everything up.

Once launched the new iOS jailbreak, the JailbreakMe 3.0, will work on firmware versions 4.2.1 through 4.3.3, and hopefully even higher, and the new tool is said to be compatible not only with the iPad 2 but also with older iDevices, starting at the iPhone 3GS and higher, which makes plenty of sense.

We’ll be back with more iPad 2 jailbreak updates in the following days, so keep following us via Facebook, Twitter and the feed to follow all the news in a timely fashion.