Kext DB

[uketernity]

Hey All,

 

Love the work everyone does here, however the 1 thing I feel is missing (especially for noobs) is a kext database that stores a description of each kext used by people to fix something in their OSX install, what its for or used to fix and perhaps a link of where to get it from?

 

Reason being, there are so many posts saying use this kext or that kext and alot of the time I find myself blindly installing them without knowing what they really do. This is especially important when using someone elses pack of kexts that they've compiled for a specific motherboard.

 

For example, I have 17 kexts in my Extras/Extensions folder and only know what 9 of them do:

 

ACPIPS2Nub.kext

AHCIPortInjector.kext

AppleACPIPlatform.kext

AppleAPIC.kext

AppleGenericPCATA.kext

AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext

ApplePS2Controller.kext

AppleSMBIOS.kext

IOAHCIBlockStorageInjector.kext

IOATABlockStorage.kext

IOATAFamily.kext

IOATAPIProtocolTransport.kext

IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext

JMicronATA.kext

OpenHaltRestart.kext

SMBIOSEnabler.kext

dsmos.kext

 

And thats only from googling around or guessing.

 

This brings me onto another idea of a kextpack database for different motherboard. Once oyu have your set of kexts that work for your motherboard + specific version of OSX, could we not have a database of these for people to download? I know there is the OSX Database above, but theres nothing in it?

 

Anyone got any ideas on this?

 

Oli

[HMiller]

Hi Oli,

 

I often used to wish for such a thing, and occasionally still do. I think it would be a great addition to the community if someone such as yourself were to catalog all the various kexts.

 

However it could be said that developing knowledge of the various kexts is a right of passage. It's not that things should be harder than necessary, but once you have spent hours switching kexts in and out of s/l/extensions while rebooting between your safety partition and your test partition, you just get to know what they do. Same for EFI string vs. Gfx injection kext vs. DSDT.aml to get one's graphic card working. Or peoples' 2 or 3 different methods to get onboard audio going on the same model of board. After a while the "best" way to handle a certain board sort of gets ironed out and then you start seeing packages/guides for that board, albeit usually without documentation of the package's contents.

 

And then Apple comes out with a new version of something and the big brains come out with new kexts/methods. As an example fakesmc and chameleon will probably allow you to remove quite a few of the kexts you have listed below.

 

I don't want to sound discouraging, just that it's a bit hard to make a comprehensive list of things that are changing frequently. At the moment, no one cares about much except Snow Leopard anyway and that is a whole new world of challenges so we'll see how that goes (typing this from snow now in fact I think that SL will be a bit of a gateway where kexts that are still useful will get updated for snow and other will fall aside. So the number of various kexts/methods that do the same thing will go down under SL, at least for a while. That's my guess at any rate.

 

Good luck!