Hello all,

The title says it all. I'm sure it's been brought up before, but wouldn't it be great if we had a device manager for OSx86? Mac OS X doesn't have one because it usually doesn't have to run on the Frakenstein-esque hardware platforms that Windows or Ubuntu have to face. Unless of course you're running OSx86.

I wish I had the programming skills to pull off such a feat. An OS X device manager could identify unassigned hardware, load and unload kexts (whilst fixing bad permissions), and make the process of configuring drivers and hardware less painful. And as an added bonus, it might result in less questions to the InsanelyMac forums.

I doubt someone's going to undertake such a program anytime soon. Nevertheless I figured I'd ask if anyone else has been hankering for such a thing, or if anyone was already working on something.

Thoughts?

- GeekMan

DPCI Manager identifies even PCI harware that does not has driver/kext loaded.

System profiler also detects devices without drivers too, like USB Firewire.

It is not necessary because IOKit is designed to cope with all these issues. The problem is that on hackintoshes there are few experienced kext-programmers and alot of unsupported hardware, so dirty tricks and kexthacks are everywhere.

Goodness, I've brought in the ringers!

Thanks for the replies. I actually hadn't heard of DPCI Manager before. It seems like a useful tool.

I was actually thinking more along the lines of something that would also show the kext associated with any given PCI device, with the ability to load/unload kexts through a GUI. It would allow for some more organization of our "dirty tricks", especially when juggling different driver versions (how many copies of AppleSMBIOS are out there?).

Perhaps this sort of thing isn't really practical from a programming perspective. Besides, I hardly expect hacking to be a user-friendly experience.

In any case, I've recently gotten my hands on a Kalaway 10.5.2 image, which has made my Hackintosh life much, much easier.

Cheers,

- GeekMan