iPhone Crash Logs Reveals Some Inner Workings
My iPhone "crashed" today when I was deleting an email account. In reality, it was unresponsive for about 30 seconds and then went back to normal. When I plugged it into my computer, I was greeted with a prompt asking if I wanted to send diagnostic data to Apple and a button that said "Show Details" that took me to /System/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/My iPhone/ which contained two files: Preferences-2007-06-29-202724.crash and Preferences-2007-06-29-202724.plist (links point to the files).
I discovered some curious things while reading through the two files:
OS Version is officially "OS X 1.0 (1A543a)" (a similar crash log for a desktop process has the version number as "10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)")
A non-comprehensive list of Frameworks (Bold means it does not appear on desktop OS X):
AddressBook
AddressBookUI
AppSupport
AudioToolbox
BluetoothManager
Calendar
Celestial
CFNetwork
CoreAudio
CoreFoundation
CoreGraphics
CoreSurface
CoreTelephony
CoreVideo
GraphicsServices
IAP
IOKit
ITSync
JavaScriptCore
LayerKit
MBX2D
MBXConnect
MeCCA
Message
MessageUI
MobileBluetooth
MobileMusicPlayer
MusicLibrary
OpenGLES
Preferences
Security
TelephonyUI
UIKit
URLify
WebCore
WebKit
The most intriguing ones (to me at least) are: Celestial.framework (because of it's non-descriptive name) and CoreSurface.framework (because I think it deals with the touchscreen).
On a similar note, I tried SSH, FTP, Telnet, etc to my iPhone and as expected none worked.
Rick wrote:
You haven't noticed that thing is running you as root? It's connected to the net, right? I'm glad you couldn't break in but does that mean no one can?
Posted on 01-Jul-07 at 7:20 am | Permalink
Ken wrote:
Having the crash reporter will help them fix these bugs quickly. But I'm surprised they didn't encrypt the crash log data because each one wil reveal intimate details of the apps.
Posted on 01-Jul-07 at 10:13 am | Permalink
Elliot wrote:
It doesn't seem to be giving us much more than the names of apps and their version numbers. Encrypting the data would be scary. I think most users would be smart enough not to send Apple stuff they can't read, because that would mean Apple could be getting anything, such as your passwords, private emails, etc.
Posted on 02-Jul-07 at 11:31 pm | Permalink
Jesper Ravnsgaard wrote:
Celestial.framework.. hmmm, would GPS satellites count as celestial bodies? :)
Posted on 09-Jul-07 at 6:18 pm | Permalink
martin gordon wrote:
Just wanted to say hi to another iPhone toting computer literate martin gordon.
-Martin Gordon
hi!
Posted on 13-Jul-07 at 7:13 pm | Permalink
bobo wrote:
Looks like the Celestial framework deals with system sounds and alerts–the framework dir has stuff like "SystemSoundVibrationPatterns.plist" and "SystemSoundBehaviour.plist" in it. CoreSurface is only 26K, looks like it's just some basic image stuff. I think all the touch stuff is in UIKit.
Posted on 01-Aug-07 at 6:43 pm | Permalink