#Environment Types

The environment types that palera1n has available options for you to use.

#Rootless ( -l )

Rootless is the new jailbreak type for iOS/iPadOS 15 and higher.

#What is it?

This environment encapsulates the idea of not needing the root filesystem for jailbreak related content. Rather, stemming from the traditional jailbreak style that offers a lot more convenience such as reduced jailbreak detection and less risk to badly designed packages that may cause the device to not function as intended.

Unfortunately developers need to recompile their existing packages to support this new format.

This is mainly due to the enforcement of SSV (Signed System Volume) with iOS/iPadOS 15, which heavily restricts what you’re able to do with the root (/) filesystem.

Rootless jailbreak files are typically stored in a writable directory being /private/preboot/<hash>/<jailbreak>-<random-set-of-characters>, which is essentially used to store files which is used before the device boots. Though, due to the path being randomized and (absurdly) long, theres a symlink to it being /var/jb which makes it easy to locate the current fakeroot you’re using.

Operating systems such as tvOS and iBridge are not subject to the SSV (Signed System Volume) enforcement that came with iOS/iPadOS 15 and above. It will be a similar experience to that to iOS 14 and below.

iOS 15, iPadOS 15, darwinOS 15, macOS 11 and visionOS 1 have enforced SSV at this current point in time.

#Rootful ( -f )

Rootful jailbreaks are those that modify the root filesystem.

#What is it?

This is the traditional way of jailbreaking, where the root (/) filesystem mounted as read/write and jailbreak files are stored in it.

People prefer this type of jailbreak as it has the most compatibility between already existing packages that have been around more than a few years, and has had an infrastructure that has been standard ever since the beginning of jailbreaking. However, ever since the introduction of iOS/iPadOS 15 this has all changed due to the enforcement of SSV (Signed System Volume).

Rootful on iOS/iPadOS 15 comes at a major cost that needs to be taken into consideration before using on these versions. Any true rootful jailbreaks (such as legacy palera1n) on these operating systems would result in a tethered jailbreak. If you want a semi-tethered jailbreak it would require a substantial amount of storage used due to substituting the real filesystem with a copied one thats typically stored in another APFS partition.

fakeFS (fake filesystem) is typically more safer than a traditional rootful jailbreak as most of what everything you do will be on that other partition, so deleting that will have no effect on your real system.

Operating systems such as tvOS 15 and iBridge are able to use the traditional jailbreak style similar to iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 14 without the need of having another APFS partition (or tethered), due to SSV (Signed System Volume) not being enforced on those platforms.

Another issue with rootful on iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 15+ is that packages not compiled with a newer Xcode version will need to be resigned due to changes introduced with those versions, making older packages often break and not be functional (however you can resign them, but its discouraged as using old packages can often have some undefined behaviors). Though most newer packages will not have this issue.