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macosnetwork-programmingdriversiokit

Do I need two machines to develop IOKit Mac drivers?


I'm building an IOKit CFPlugin driver for OS X. I'll be working with network data coming in that will be translated to MIDI data. No hardware is involved other than the built-in Airport. I have experience with drivers on Windows machines and firmware but this is my first dip into doing it on the Mac. So far things are going pretty well, but the Apple documentation sez: "For safety reasons, you should not load your driver on your development machine."

I only have one Mac. I really don't want two Macs- sorry, Apple. Should I take this warning seriously? Are there things I need to know?

Thanks, Tom Jeffries


Solution

  • You could also consider running OS X inside a VM as your testbed. It would surely be much more convenient that having a separate boot volume.