Comment by theknarf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theknarf | Hacker News Reader

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  Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>
    109    0 0xffffff7f83eb3000 0x7000     0x7000     net.sf.tuntaposx.tun (1.0) 95DD963D-E23D-3B0F-8DE8-A4D2F6BFA5CC <8 6 5 1>
    110    0 0xffffff7f83eba000 0x7000     0x7000     net.sf.tuntaposx.tap (1.0) 23FDB715-3D0D-3A26-ACBA-E3794C231CB7 <8 6 5 1>
    111    3 0xffffff7f83ec1000 0xf0000    0xf0000    org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv (6.0.12) 79AB3317-5F6D-3FE0-965C-92E45277AA0D <8 6 5 3 1>
    112    0 0xffffff7f83fb1000 0x29000    0x29000    com.intel.kext.intelhaxm (7.5.1) D0CC7B8F-1F62-33B1-BE6B-B5573D2A607B <8 6 5 3 1>
    117    0 0xffffff7f84000000 0x8000     0x8000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB (6.0.12) B1285DF7-2D17-3497-A948-40825951123A <116 111 54 8 6 5 3 1>
    180    0 0xffffff7f84964000 0x5000     0x5000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt (6.0.12) C1B5DFEA-CB4C-30BD-9A92-C92391F7BDE0 <111 8 6 5 3 1>
    184    0 0xffffff7f84a2f000 0x6000     0x6000     com.valvesoftware.SteamInput (4357.73.42) 17B6ECD0-A50A-3D6A-B350-9C70805EE129 <44 6 5 3>
    191    0 0xffffff7f85b19000 0x6000     0x6000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp (6.0.12) F8D3E46F-C4EA-397A-ACB1-EF2BF77C0506 <111 6 5 1>
    193    0 0xffffff7f85b2e000 0x6000     0x6000     com.getdropbox.dropbox.kext (1.10.3) F29DD0CB-48D6-311A-9B69-E39CF775493C <8 6 5 2 1>

- Dropbox

- Virtualbox

- Tuntap for VPN

- Valve controller support

- Intel haxm for Android Emulator

Pretty insane for an application like Dropbox to use a kernel extension.

not overly, i'm fairly sure it provides a virtual filesystem

That is pretty insane.

Why? I can't think of an alternative that users wouldn't complain about.

Insanely useful?

They use it in SmartSync, so files that are actually stored in the cloud and not physically on your local machine, are visible and selectable in the Finder and automatically downloaded on demand.

It would be great if there were some user-space support for this in next year's macOS release. I think it would be useful for a lot of cloud storage providers.

Apple previously added third-party sync integration points into the Finder to stop Dropbox from injecting into that process (when it was easier and Apple was locking it down). It’s likely they do not want to break Dropbox and will try to support whatever it needs.

There is NSFileProviderExtension, but last I heard it was still a very immature API.

That is literally what the FileProvider Framework (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider) allows.

What program are you using that relies on net.sf.tuntaposx.tun? macOS has had their own utun driver since a long time.

I would guess a VPN program which provides a layer 2 VPN option. utun only supports layer 3 VPNs.

Just like iOS. Which sucks because being able to be on my home network while not physically at home would have been nice in the past, mostly before Spotify was a thing.

DriverKit has support for building ethernet drivers:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkingdriverki...

I could imagine this being used for implementing a layer 2 VPN.

ZeroTier has eliminated the use of the tap kernel extension in releases 1.42+ when used on macOS 10.13+. They aren't using DriverKit but a combination of poorly and undocumented features. They expect to eventually have to develop a DriverKit based implementation. Details at https://www.zerotier.com/how-zerotier-eliminated-kernel-exte...

DriverKit has only been around since 10.15 so currently it's not easy to correctly support a range of versions with everything so massively in flux and Apple's aggressive deprecation schedule. Writing and maintaining macOS system level software (including drivers, etc.) has generally become a pretty big headache since around 10.13, stuff is constantly breaking due to OS changes and regressions.

This obviously always happened to some extent, but the pace of breaking changes and bugs picked up massively around that time - I think a large part of the problem is that Apple's own developers don't actually need to use any of these features themselves, so they are just dumped onto 3rd party developers in a half-arsed state. I'm thinking of kernel extension authorisation (which was super buggy in earlier 10.13.x releases and still has weird quirks), various user consent additions (there are no APIs for directly checking or prompting for many of the permissions, let alone notifications when the user grants or revokes consent), DriverKit, EndpointSecurity, etc.

OpenConnect (https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/)

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