3 ms·

Could you point us to the talk where they say this? Not doubting, just curious for more info

by tambourine_man 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago
"System Extensions and DriverKit" https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/702/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/702/ From the transcript: "MacOS 10.15 Catalina will be the last release to fully support Kernel Extensions without compromises." Specifically, for the capabilities supported by System Extensions and the device families supported by DriverKit, using a Kernel Extension to do that same job is now deprecated and a future release of macOS will not load Kernel Extensions of these kinds. In future releases, we will add more kinds of System Extensions and more device families to DriverKit. In turn, Kernel Extensions of those kinds will also be deprecated."
- AshamedCaptain 7y ago
  Banning third-party developers from loading modules into kernel-space does not a microkernel make. Apple-approved developers are still going to be loading whatever crap they want into kernel space, incl AMD or nVidia graphics drivers and the lot. It's not like they can convert XNU into an actual microkernel in less than a decade or two. This just means that if you're not on the Apple-whitelist then macOS becomes a yet even more close platform for you. Wanted to developed a driver for a PCIe network card? Sorry, no can do!
  - monocasa 7y ago
    GPUs are kind of interesting, because the kernel space part of a GPU driver is managing the MMUs, and a lot of microkernels see MMU management (even of devices) as still one of their core roles. It's basically a really legacy IOMMU inside most GPUs. Split off a user space process to kick off command list execution and respond to interrupts (most of the rest of the kernel driver these days), and I can totally see a microkernel with GPU drivers in it still being ideologically pure.

3 ms·

Could you point us to the talk where they say this? Not doubting, just curious for more info

by tambourine_man 7y ago

Could you point us to the talk where they say this? Not doubting, just curious for more info

pjmlp 7y ago
"System Extensions and DriverKit" https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/702/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/702/ From the transcript: "MacOS 10.15 Catalina will be the last release to fully support Kernel Extensions without compromises." Specifically, for the capabilities supported by System Extensions and the device families supported by DriverKit, using a Kernel Extension to do that same job is now deprecated and a future release of macOS will not load Kernel Extensions of these kinds. In future releases, we will add more kinds of System Extensions and more device families to DriverKit. In turn, Kernel Extensions of those kinds will also be deprecated."
- AshamedCaptain 7y ago
  Banning third-party developers from loading modules into kernel-space does not a microkernel make. Apple-approved developers are still going to be loading whatever crap they want into kernel space, incl AMD or nVidia graphics drivers and the lot. It's not like they can convert XNU into an actual microkernel in less than a decade or two. This just means that if you're not on the Apple-whitelist then macOS becomes a yet even more close platform for you. Wanted to developed a driver for a PCIe network card? Sorry, no can do!
  - monocasa 7y ago
    GPUs are kind of interesting, because the kernel space part of a GPU driver is managing the MMUs, and a lot of microkernels see MMU management (even of devices) as still one of their core roles. It's basically a really legacy IOMMU inside most GPUs. Split off a user space process to kick off command list execution and respond to interrupts (most of the rest of the kernel driver these days), and I can totally see a microkernel with GPU drivers in it still being ideologically pure.