Will driverkit become popular?

[vanir2020]

Apple requires drivers to migrate from iokit to driverkit, and many types of iokit driver are no longer supported.

I checked the interface of driverkit. The functions available to developers have been reduced a lot.
Especially for some drivers that provide high-speed IO, such as raid drivers, can driverkit meet the requirements?

 

[Ritsuka]

DriverKit supports only some kind of devices right now. Kext are not totally deprecated. Supports for more classes of devices will come in the future, in the meantime those devices can still continue to use a kext.

Here's a list of what's deprecated and what's not in 10.15: https://developer.apple.com/it/support/kernel-extensions/

 

[ondioline]

Eventually it will be mandatory, so 'yes'

Moving the drivers and such from the kernel to userspace is ironically closer to the original microkernel OS design Mach was intended for, rather than how they employed it in XNU

 

[guzhogi]

I really hope, but doubt, that companies make drivers for older hardware like printers. My school district has a bunch of HP printers that only work with drivers Apple provided years ago. The latest drivers on the HP website for some of our printers are for Mac OS 9. Plus, generic drivers might not fully support all features, if generic drivers exist at all.

This could cause problems for a lot of reasons. Schools often need paper copies of documentation, and don't have the funding for new, supported hardware. Plus, on the individual level, some people can't afford new hardware, either.

 

[peter34]

normally printers are not using kext drivers, so it should not be problem.
More problematic will be network devices or some proprietary audio devices. USB-C hubs with ethernet are working on Big Sur out of box, only thing is that they use lot of CPU.

 

[leman]

I’m very curious to see how SCSI devices will perform with the new user space drivers... the cost of crossing between kernel and user space have been the long-term reason why these drivers were kernel extensions in the first place. I have a suspicion that Intel systems might take a hit but the new Apple Silicon Macs will be specifically optimized for this.

 

[ondioline]

I’m very curious to see how SCSI devices will perform with the new user space drivers... the cost of crossing between kernel and user space have been the long-term reason why these drivers were kernel extensions in the first place. I have a suspicion that Intel systems might take a hit but the new Apple Silicon Macs will be specifically optimized for this.

It really just depends on what kind of framework APIs end up being developed for System Extensions. This isn't a strict microkernel setup involving userland servers and IPC, the driverkit frameworks and such directly interface with the capabilities that have been exposed from the kernel. It's functionally just sandboxing the drivers from the kernel space. You can see a graphical description of what I mean here:

Creating a Driver Using the DriverKit SDK | Apple Developer Documentation

Create a driver that supports proprietary features of your company’s hardware devices.

developer.apple.com