CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Extensions are moving away from the kernel

From the outset, Mac OS X and macOS have been designed around a relatively small kernel which is given additional capabilities by kernel extensions. The kernel itself runs at a highly privileged level, giving it most direct access to resources such as the processor, memory and hardware devices, often known as Ring 0. Kernel extensions operate at a close level of privilege (Ring 1) so that they too can make hardware such as ethernet and Thunderbolt ports work, and they’re loaded once the kernel itself is running, before the rest of macOS. Big Sur’s kernel has just over 550 standard kernel extensions which extend it to make everything else work.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Popular Macos topics Top

New
First poster: bot
We’ll guide you through the process of using Homebrew package manager to install security tools on macOS to exploit vulnerabilities found...
New
First poster: bot
After months of silence about Apple’s impressive M1 chip, Intel just clapped back with a carefully crafted takedown of the Arm-based chip...
New
First poster: bot
Apple announced that it would be moving from Intel processors to Arm-based Apple Silicon CPUs for Macs at WWDC 2020. The Apple Silicon-ba...
New
First poster: AstonJ
Over the past few years, Apple seems increasingly willing to cooperate with authoritarian governments, uninterested in protecting its own...
New
First poster: bot
Swift is about to get its Concurrency features. Their development is going very well, with many proposals actively reviewed and a lot of ...
New
First poster: bot
Apple’s leaders continue to deny developers of two obvious truths: That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase c...
New
First poster: bot
Learn how to use the brand new actor model to protect your application from unwanted data-races and memory issues.
New
First poster: bot
The report speculates that Apple’s increased use of Google Cloud suggests the company’s rising cloud storage requirements have outpaced i...
New
First poster: bot
I’m a bit of a sustainability nerd. I love the idea of living a life where your carbon footprint is neutral (or negative) and you leave t...
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
Margaret
Hello content creators! Happy new year. What tech topics do you think will be the focus of 2021? My vote for one topic is ethics in tech...
New
dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Jamis Buck @jamis This month, we have the pleasure of spotlighting author Jamis Buck, who has written Mazes for Prog...
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Sophie DeBenedetto @SophieDeBenedetto The days of the traditional request-response web application are long gone, b...
New