Reboot/respiring.....definitions?

Here is the difference.... and btw there is really no difference between a "soft" and hard reboot. The same thing is actually happening whether you slide to turn off, hold down sleep till it shuts off, or hold down home and sleep till it shuts off/reboots. You are doing a complete reboot of the OS in those cases. A reboot is a complete reboot.

But what you "see" on the iPad as GUI (graphical user interface) is not the OS, it is another application running under the OS: Springboard.app. This is much like how OSX on a Mac, also running a form of BSD like iOS devices, uses Aqua as its GUI.

It is what launches apps, adds icons, lets you move them, etc. It "is" the iOS experience.

Certain jailbreak apps hook into Springboard.app and if apps like that are installed Springboard needs to be restarted.... as in a "respring."

In the old days this was a dangerous thing... If something screwed up Springboard.app, and many things could do that--even installing too many apps in iOS 1.x--you would be left with an unusable device. But since everything "else" was still running you could often SSH into the device, fix the problem with Springboard.app, and voila, it would "spring" to life again. But most people were not savvy enough to do that and had to restore their device.

Now we have Mobile Substrate to cope with these kinds of jb apps. This boots instead of Springboard if something like that happens. It's called "Safe Mode" because it is really to just fix whatever caused the problem--sometimes it was just a bad boot and needs another respring. TSometimes the last app installed is a problem and needs to be installed. So this has greatly reduced the risk of crashing due to a jb app.

Michael

Last edited by Tinman; Yesterday at 06:00 PM.