• @psud@lemmy.world
    43•9 months ago

    Compiling your own kernel, configured for your hardware and use, was normal in the early days

    • @alonely0@programming.dev
      24•9 months ago

      You’re not really changing anything, you’re adding functionalities. Also, it appears that apple has limited their capabilities and doesn’t even recommend them anymore, so it wouldn’t be crazy if they just deprecated them in favor of system extensions, which sadly they don’t call sexts. On the surface, kexts appear to be basically userland ioctls, which you have on windows too.

        • Affine ConnectionEnglish
          1•9 months ago

          Maybe about 4-5 years ago, I read through the source to find obscure undocumented features of a couple system calls that allowed me to write a detailed system/process monitor utility that does things that nothing else seems to know about.

      • @Tschuuuls@feddit.de
        2•9 months ago

        10+ year Mac user here. It’s a bit sad but better for system stability. A lot of weird hardware and software used to just inject kexts instead of doing stuff in userspace. This can cause weird issues like battery drain, crashes etc. which are hell to debug as a “average user”. I don’t really miss running “Entre Check” to figure out weird issues :D

      • @WoodenBleachers@lemmy.basedcount.com
        0•9 months ago

        As a mac-first guy I wasn’t aware of mimicked (really bothers me this word is spelled with a ‘k’) functionality on windows. I simply mean that by adding a kext you are, by design, changing the code of the kernel. More of a particulars in speech thing.