For users who bought the sleek (and expensive) Microsoft Surface RT or Surface 2, the reality was brutal: a beautiful tablet with a kickstand and a keyboard, crippled by a desert of software.
In early 2013, the first crack appeared. A hacker known as discovered a flaw involving a specific, privileged Windows kernel driver. By chaining a series of privilege escalation exploits, developers achieved what seemed impossible: disabling Secure Boot on the fly. windows rt 8.1 to android
This led to the release of the —a simple one-click tool that allowed unsigned code to run. Without the Jailbreak, loading a Linux kernel (let alone Android) was impossible. The Linux Kernel Abstraction Android is not magic; it is a heavily modified Linux kernel running a Java-based (Dalvik/ART) userspace. The SoCs in Windows RT devices (Nvidia Tegra) had excellent open-source Linux support. Nvidia had released documentation for the Tegra line, and the mainline Linux kernel already supported the architecture. For users who bought the sleek (and expensive)
While you will never replace your iPad with a Surface RT running Android, you can turn a $50 eBay paperweight into a fascinating conversation piece that dual-boots two rival operating systems. In a world of locked bootloaders and planned obsolescence, that tiny act of digital rebellion is its own reward. By chaining a series of privilege escalation exploits,