OS X and iOS Kernel Programming

The Info.plist File

The Macintosh platform has always supported a plug-and-play design for devices, which requires no configuration after installing the driver. Mac OS X, with the help of the I/O Kit, is no exception. Unlike the kernel extension that we developed in the previous chapter, which loads as soon as it is added to the system, a driver is loaded only when one of the devices that it supports is connected to the computer. In this way, even though there may be hundreds of drivers installed on a system, only those that correspond to hardware that is actually connected to the computer will be loaded and taking up memory.

In Chapter 3, we saw that a kernel extension requires a property list file to define such things as its entry points. ...