On: Mach kernel

[pjmlp]

They are moving all drivers to user space.

All the ones corresponding to the former IO Kit do require C++, all the remaining categories are going to be supported from Swift as well.

This is planned to take place across several releases, at the end of which no kernel drivers will be any longer allowed.

[andrekandre → pjmlp]

> They are moving all drivers to user space.

probably you mean 3-rd party drivers? or even apple internally?

[edit] i couldn’t tell that from the slides mentioned below, but maybe i missed something

> All the ones corresponding to the former IO Kit do require C++

yea, which leads me to believe if apple was to rewrite the kernel, they probably would go with c++ ... or maybe it’s just that swift doesn’t have its embedded chops up to snuff yet...

relevant slides:

https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2019/702vygot...

[pjmlp → andrekandre]

Watch the presentation, as it contains more information as the slides.

The long term roadmap is as follows:

1 - surface kernel APIs for a specific driver model as userspace API

2 - deprecate for the respective OS release the kernel entry points related to the newly surfaced driver model

3 - remove the kernel api on the following OS release

4 - rinse and repeat untill there aren't any kernel driver APIs left

The ones being released with Catalina are just the first wave.

[andrekandre → pjmlp]

thanks!

i’ll watch the video then, very interesting

[cpeterso → andrekandre]

Here's the video of that "System Extensions and DriverKit" session from WWDC 2019:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/702/

[andrekandre → cpeterso]

thanks, watching it now ^^