STILL a 0% success rate on A7 devices (if using Linux or an AMD Hackintosh)

[cherry-412]

Related: #269 #210 #197 #96 #144 #113 #51

Tried basically everything in #96 as it seems to be more of an A7 issue rather than just a problem on the iPhone 5s. Cannot get it to work on latest iOS iPad mini 2 (cellular) and iPad Air 1 (wifi) after several hundred tries throughout 2 days (i was being extremely patient with this until now)

Current consensus is that we're supposed to try 15-40 times on A7 devices and it'll just magically work at some point.

Hardware used:

• OpenCore based Hackintosh on Mojave, Ryzen 7 2700. Later reinstalled with High Sierra.
• Ubuntu 18.04 and latest Linux Mate on i7-4700MQ, both on live USB

Versions tried (at least 40-50 attempts on each per hardware. i was keeping count)

• axi0mX master
• https://github.com/LinusHenze/ipwndfu_public
• https://github.com/synackuk/ipwndfu
• https://github.com/meowox/ipwndfu (because it implements Fix A7 support #51)

What happens:

• On USB 3.0 both PCs -> iPads restart to normal mode a couple seconds after running the exploit, losing connection to ipwndfu.
• On USB 2.0 both PCs -> about 80% of the time "Exploit failed. Device did not enter pwned DFU Mode" with no restart. 20% of the time they do restart like on USB 3.0.

Also looked at:

• Running without sudo fails at grabbing the device langid. To get around this, I always ran using sudo.
• Unofficial lightning cables don't seem to work, so I used 3 different official apple cables, 2 came with the iPads, one brand new.
• Explicitly using Python 2.7 was suggested in Fairly unrealible #91 and exploit always fail #108, so Python 2.7 was used.
• This comment details a mac restart trick that worked for A6X. Didn't work for me.
• Issue iPad Mini 3 [A1600] - PWND~! Ubuntu 18.04 #161 apparently had some solution going but never submitted a pull request?
• dora2ios iPwnder32 and checkra1n 0.10.1 (gives error -31) also literally never work. May be relevant.

Whatever i tried, did not work even once.

I have absolutely no idea how anyone's getting this to work after only 15 or so tries. Reading discussions about this issue online only presents further contradictions as to what's required to get this to work reliably. Original hardware or hackintosh? USB 2.0 or 3.0? Intel or AMD? High Sierra of Mojave? 2013 Macbook or T2 Macbook? I even read on YouTube that someone got it to work by using a High Sierra VM on Mac hardware. People seem to have completely random results.

Deeply frustrating to see that the original developer abandoned the project long ago despite such issues being present..

[cherry-412]

Update: I got it to work on both of my A7 devices. Here's how:

I installed MacOS High Sierra via OpenCore to the aforementioned i7-4700MQ PC, which is a HP Envy 15-J151NR laptop.
Used synackuk's fork of ipwndfu. Worked on the first try and would never fail as long a USB 2.0 port is used (USB 3.0 would reboot the device and fail still). iPwnder32 and checkra1n also worked.

So in my case the exploit would only ever work on an Intel hackintosh. Fails on an AMD hackintosh regardless of Mac OS version, fails on Linux regardless of cpu or distro. I haven't tested on actual Mac hardware so I cannot make a statement about that.

I'm still going to keep this issue open because the readme.md specifically mentions that S5L8960 AND Linux are both supported, plus making no mentions about any processor requirements regarding the computer running the exploit.

Anyone else having these issues please log your experiences here.