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Re: Personality?

On Nov 1, 2007, at 3:20 PM, Stéphane Sudre wrote:
What's a personality supposed to be for a StartupItem or Kernel Extension?

For kexts, it is documented here: (I just went to <http://developer.apple.com > and searched for "Personality")
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceDrivers/Conceptual/IOKitFundamentals/Matching/chapter_5_section_2.html >

Basically, it is a dictionary in your kext's plist that is used to drive IOKit's passive matching. Also, when the driver goes through active matching, the contents of the personality is passed to the driver as its initial property list.

Note that any given kext can have several personalities, each offering different matching criteria, and possibly other data left as hints to the driver object that gets run later. This is why they are called "personalities", since one kext can match on several different kinds of devices and can alter its behavior based on the selected personality.

Also, your kext only has to contain personalities if it is going to participate in IOKit matching. IOKit families typically don't have personalities since they are loaded as libraries for other kexts, and non-IOKit kexts obviously don't have personalities.

I'll let somebody else address StartupItems.
 - Dean _______________________________________________
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