Extend built-in DEXT?

Apple developer documentation says:

If your hardware communicates entirely using standards-based protocols, you can ship a driver that matches your hardware to one of the built-in system drivers.

Is this possible to do if macOS itself has the driver implemented as a DEXT?

Particularly, I'm interested in providing support for an FTDI device with a custom product ID in my application. I've understood that macOS implements the FTDI driver as a DEXT (/System/Library/DriverExtensions/com.apple.DriverKit-AppleUSBFTDI.dext).

In Catalina, it's possible to work around this problem by instructing the users to install FTDI's custom KEXT driver, but that doesn't work anymore in Big Sur because the KEXT is blocked there.

Replies

Would it be possible to take com.apple.DriverKit-AppleUSBFTDI.dext, modify the Info.plist, resign the package, and install the DEXT as your own?
Does anyone know is this possible? It seems that FTDI has not been able to come out with a Big Sur compatible driver yet, so currently there's no solution for custom product ID FTDI devices.
Does anyone know how to load /System/Library/DriverExtensions/com.apple.DriverKit-AppleUSBFTDI.dext?
I asked a similar question to Apple Developer Support and they said to open a Feedback Assistant ticket with the matching dictionary so that it could be added to the offical driver. There is no codeless-kext equivalent for Apple-FTDI dext as far as I know.
Ok, that's really interesting. It would be great to be somehow able to test whether the Apple driver works with your custom PID device before making the request to Apple, though.

I want to unload system driver of FTDI and control the hardware use my program, In old mac OS versions I could use "sudo kextunload –b com.apple.driver.AppleUSBFTDI" to do this, but In Big Sur, this command dose not available any longer.Is there any method to disable system dext dirver in Big Sur? who knows how to do this? thanks very much.

  • I seem to have managed to unload it using sudo kextunload -b com.apple.DriverKit-AppleUSBFTDI

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