[geeks] Apple applications phoning home

[Mark]

On 23 Oct 2007, at 20:29, der Mouse wrote:

> Oh, if you're talking about third-party provided kernel modules, then
> yeah, it's understandable.  I thought you were talking about
> third-party devices interacting with OS-provided drivers.

No, USBIOKit is a OS provided Kernel Extension (KEXT).

>> It doesn't matter how careful you are, you will always encounter the
>> unknown in the wild, and that has the potential to stop your software
>> working as it should.
>
> Certainly.  The device might not *work*, but it should fail  
> gracefully,
> and certainly not in a way that takes down the whole kernel.

My point is that in order to fail gracefully you some how have to  
know what to expect to catch the error in the first place. If someone  
throws something unexpected at it it's still going to fail. A lot of  
USB stuff DOES fail gracefully in OS X. It's very good with USB stuff  
generally, but from time to time there are devices that give it a  
headache, USB Audio used to be one that it didn't like - it's  
supposed to work seamlessly with it but at tone time a few vendors  
USB  Audio devices caused issues that weren't caught by the code in  
that revision, so it downed the Kernel. As soon as Apple *knew* what  
was causing it a handler was issued to stop it happening, BUT they  
had to know *what to expect* to stop it happening.

-- 
Mark Benson

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