Tagged: #iokit

From plug-in to working app — IOUSBHost enumeration, IOKit matching, the DriverKit dext load, the user-space SDK. A complete trace of one device's journey through the stack.

How macOS's GPU driver hands off work to Apple Silicon's tile-based deferred renderer, and why unified memory makes IOSurface zero-copy across CPU and GPU.

The full path of an interrupt from the device asserting a line, through the AIC, through XNU's exception handler, to the driver's IOInterruptDispatchSource callback running on a workloop.

How XNU tells every driver to drop power when idle and bring it back when needed — the IORegistry-walked power graph, IOPMrootDomain, and the sleep/wake choreography.

From a MTLCommandBuffer.commit call to the shader cores running — the userspace encoder, the kernel driver's IOConnectCallMethod, the GPU firmware processor, and where commands actually dispatch.

Same IOKit object model, userland process. Why kexts are dying, what DriverKit gives you, and how a USB driver actually crosses the boundary.

The IOKit object that lets CPU, GPU, ANE, ISP, and media engines share the same physical pages. The unifying primitive behind unified memory's performance story.

Embedded C++, an object tree, and matching dictionaries — IOKit is how every driver on macOS gets loaded, paired with hardware, and called.