Even more so when you consider that a developer will now have to rely on Apple to fix bugs or add new features - which Apple may have no inclination to do so so if it feels it isn't aligned to their own business interest (thus anti-competitive). Especially when we consider how such a move is also anti-competitive and anti-consumer, and thus helps Apple's business.įorcing developers to make an expensive migration from their own tried-and-tested and stable codebase over which they have full control, to use Apple's OS API's is a developer hostile move. Their popularity, and relative stability of the kernel extensions these applications used, is proof that Apple's black and white approach of 'all non-Apple kernel extensions are bad' is rubbish. To clarify - I was specifically talking about existing application firewalls and VM applications for macOS that use / used kernel extensions and already have a large userbase on macOS. That's a misunderstanding of what I was trying to convey. > but your claim that third-party software worked fine without issues is factually incorrect. In the early days, the implementations between AMD and Intel were so different that you often needed specific builds for one or the other implementations, and you couldn't have both loaded at the same time (even if just 1 active and every other implementation inactive). On macOS there were essentially two low-level implementations, one for ARM and one for Intel, and a higher-level abstraction, amework, that lets you simply 'create' virtual machine instances, which then make use of the various virtualisation features depending on the underlying hardware. So if you have libvirt, you have a high-level abstraction for multiple hypervisors (like KVM and Xen) which in turn know how to interact with various hardware implementations to actually have it act the way we want it.

Then you get some higher level abstractions that allow you to use a virtualisation interface to make use of the system without having to re-invent that interface every time some new hardware gets released.

Even a type-1 hypervisor like Xen would need to know a bit about the specifics of the hardware to know what features exist and how to use them.

but you need a different software implementation to make use of it, even if only to use the different ISA and setup procedures.Įven within the same architecture you might need different low-level interfacing software to make use of it. Similar in functionality, different in implementation.

Os x virtualization