Mac driver development

Question

I'm thinking of porting the Windows driver to OS X. Now I'm just starting to look around to find out what is available, and there is a lot about C and cocoa objects. Cocoa language and structure seems to be a high level API, am I right to assume that?

I have strong C ++ skills and I use them to develop the kernel, can I use the same skills to develop Mac drivers (I think the answer is yes). Does the Macintosh have any type of / dev application for creating drivers?

Answer 1

The Apple Hardware and Driver page contains a lot of information about developing Mac drivers. That should be enough to get you started. Some of the highlights are:

• Getting Started - A guided learning path for hardware and driver developers new to Mac OS X.

• Framework - API links organized by the framework.

• USB Code Example - Resources for developing USB devices and software for accessing them.

• FireWire Code Sample - Resources for developing FireWire devices and software to access them.

Answer 2

Start here http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/About/About.html

Mac development is usually done using Xcode, as it handles various Mac-specific concepts, such as packages and frameworks. Most likely, you will work in pure C. You will not use Cocoa to develop drivers, as this is an application-oriented infrastructure.

Answer 3

Firstly, C ++ works great, although Objective-C is not so difficult to learn. If you have experience working with Windows drivers, you know that some of the main functions - memory management is critical, time is critical, etc.

You will probably use IOKit. I suggest starting here for a good, step-by-step introduction to get the driver to work.

Kernel extensions

There are a few things that don't seem to work the way they say, and I'm trying to figure out if it is really impossible to debug the driver on the same machine, but this is better than most Apple Documentation.