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The Mac remains the Mac. That is not changing. That has been repeated by Apple executives publicly many times. Part of the Mac's heritage is that you can turn o
by xenadu02 5y ago
The Mac remains the Mac. That is not changing. That has been repeated by Apple executives publicly many times. Part of the Mac's heritage is that you can turn off the guard rails and take control of your system, including installing things like kernel extensions. These are not things most users should need to do - secure by default is very important - but they remain possible.
Others have documented the engineering that went into a new boot system for the M1 to make multi-boot and custom kernels possible. Engineering that would be pointless if no one were expected to use it.
- saagarjha 5y agoFWIW, my conversations have (to me) painted a different picture around the future of kernel extensions: it seems like they will only continue to exist until the last large company that relies on them doesn't have a userspace API replacement. The remainder seems accurate, but I would really love for Apple to allow me to put up the guardrails again but in a way that I control…
- pjmlp 5y agoThat has been the official message at all WWDC talks since userspace extensions have been introduced. Actually I look forward to it, eventually Linux and BSD will stand alone as the only classical monolithic kernels, which is kind of ironic, given how much containers and hypervisors they get loaded with anyway.