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Re: New driver installation and restart

On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 12:11 PM, Andre John Mas wrote:

Hi,

Darwin is meant to be a dynamic system, yet when it comes to installing
device drivers a restart is required for the system to realise to
be able to use the driver. Apart from forcibly loading the kext with
'kextload' couldn't the system be asked to rescan for new kexts?

Maybe this is just a pipe-dream?

Andre

If an existing/competing driver isn't already loaded then reboots aren't really needed. If the kext is known about and hardware is added or enabled it will be loaded dynamically. Now I am not sure what is needed, while the system is running, to allow for the installing of a driver in addition to placing the kext in the Extension directory. I do know that the mkext cache needs to be updated for boot time reason but this is done automatically if the modification time on the Extensions directory changes.

The driver I have worked on are for PCI devices that cannot be added while the system is running... maybe some of the firewire and USB folks can fill us in.

If an existing/competing driver is installed then it can be easier from a support perspective to force a reboot then attempt to unload the currently running driver (many things can prevent it from unloading; users shouldn't be expected to have to deal with this).

So in the end, to keep things simpler for everyone, reboots are required by (most/all) kext installers.

-Shawn
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 >New driver installation and restart (From: Andre John Mas <email@hidden>)



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