They enable Apple and third-party developers to support the rich range of hardware available both within and connected to Macs, to add new features such as software firewalls and security protection, and to modify the behaviour of macOS by rerouting sound output to apps, and so on. Kernel extensions have long been one of the most powerful and dangerous features of macOS. Apple therefore changed to prelinking the kernel with all its extensions, which makes loading much quicker but puts kernel extensions in an even more privileged position. Big Sur’s kernel has just over 550 standard kernel extensions which extend it to make everything else work.Įarly versions of Mac OS X used to load each of their kernel extensions individually, which made the boot process interminably long. 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. 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.
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