You’re not really changing anything, you’re adding functionalities. Also, it appears that apple has limited their capabilities and doesn’t even recommend them anymore, so it wouldn’t be crazy if they just deprecated them in favor of system extensions, which sadly they don’t call sexts. On the surface, kexts appear to be basically userland ioctls, which you have on windows too.
Maybe about 4-5 years ago, I read through the source to find obscure undocumented features of a couple system calls that allowed me to write a detailed system/process monitor utility that does things that nothing else seems to know about.
10+ year Mac user here. It’s a bit sad but better for system stability. A lot of weird hardware and software used to just inject kexts instead of doing stuff in userspace. This can cause weird issues like battery drain, crashes etc. which are hell to debug as a “average user”. I don’t really miss running “Entre Check” to figure out weird issues :D
As a mac-first guy I wasn’t aware of mimicked (really bothers me this word is spelled with a ‘k’) functionality on windows. I simply mean that by adding a kext you are, by design, changing the code of the kernel. More of a particulars in speech thing.
You’re not really changing anything, you’re adding functionalities. Also, it appears that apple has limited their capabilities and doesn’t even recommend them anymore, so it wouldn’t be crazy if they just deprecated them in favor of system extensions, which sadly they don’t call sexts. On the surface, kexts appear to be basically userland ioctls, which you have on windows too.
The Apple XNU kernel is open source though, right here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
Maybe about 4-5 years ago, I read through the source to find obscure undocumented features of a couple system calls that allowed me to write a detailed system/process monitor utility that does things that nothing else seems to know about.
10+ year Mac user here. It’s a bit sad but better for system stability. A lot of weird hardware and software used to just inject kexts instead of doing stuff in userspace. This can cause weird issues like battery drain, crashes etc. which are hell to debug as a “average user”. I don’t really miss running “Entre Check” to figure out weird issues :D
As a mac-first guy I wasn’t aware of mimicked (really bothers me this word is spelled with a ‘k’) functionality on windows. I simply mean that by adding a kext you are, by design, changing the code of the kernel. More of a particulars in speech thing.