I've built an open-source DriverKit + NetworkingDriverKit (IOUserNetworkEthernet/Skywalk) driver for a USB 5GbE adapter (AQTION AQC111U chipset). As far as I can tell this is the first public one for real third-party hardware: github.com/jquirke/AQC111Driver It's a fully functional driver at this point: RX/TX hardware checksum offload, jumbo frame/MTU control up to 16KB, runtime-controllable diagnostics via a custom IOUserClient, and most recently working 802.1Q VLAN support via macOS's vlan(4) software path. While attempting to implement hardware offload VLAN support, I ran into what looks like a gap between documentation and the public SDK, and I'd appreciate expert opinion either way before filing Feedback. The issue: IOUserNetworkPacket::getVlanTag()/setVlanTag() (DriverKit 24.0+) have a doc comment stating: "Get the Vlan Tag from the packet, where the driver has enabled the kFeatureHardwareVlan capability; for the case that feature is not enabled, this method will return false." kFeatureHardwareVlan does not appear anywhere in the public NetworkingDriverKit.framework/Headers/ tree confirmed via exhaustive grep, including the full hwAssist/feature-flag enum in IOUserNetworkTypes.h. I tested every plausible related mechanism exhaustively, with a real device reattach for each combination, to rule out attach-time-only behaviour: +------------------------+--------------------------+--------------+-----------+ | HWAssist bit declared? | SetSoftwareVlanSupport()| getVlanTag() | vlan0 MTU | +------------------------+--------------------------+--------------+-----------+ | Yes | true | always false | 1500 | | Yes | false | always false | 1500 | | No | not called | always false | 1496 | | No | false | always false | 1496 | +------------------------+--------------------------+--------------+-----------+ none of these combinations gates real 802.1q tag-delivery/demux behavior at all; it seems Vlan support is completely implemented in software on the MacOS side and I have to explicitly program my hardware registers to disable VLAN tagging. Question: is hardware VLAN tag insert/strip (via getVlanTag()/setVlanTag()) currently reachable from a third-party DriverKit USB Ethernet driver at all? If kFeatureHardwareVlan is real but intentionally withheld from public headers, is there a documented path (entitlement, different NDK version, etc.) to enable it or is this confirmed unreachable without Apple's direct involvement (Feedback/DTS)? Can share full test logs/methodology if useful.

We're developing a custom Thunderbolt device and want to expose it to macOS as an ethernet interface, while owning the full network stack implementation up to and including IP, TCP and UDP — bypassing the macOS network stack for those layers. Is IOEthernetController the right DriverKit approach for this, and does it allow intercepting traffic before it reaches the macOS IP stack?

Hello, I am currently developing a headless macOS daemon (HarmonBridge) that requires extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth UDP video streaming between a Mac and a Linux host over a dedicated 2.5GbE/5GbE local network link. We are utilizing widely available Realtek RTL8156 / RTL8156B based USB 2.5G network adapters. Under macOS, these adapters default to the generic com.apple.DriverKit.AppleUserECM driver. The hardware itself natively supports Jumbo Frames (MTU 9000), but the DriverKit implementation artificially restricts the MTU cap to 1500 bytes. Because we are forced through MTU 1500, we are incurring significant performance penalties: Excessive IP fragmentation for our large UDP video payloads. Unnecessary CPU overhead due to increased hardware interrupts and header processing at 2.5Gbps speeds. For a latency-critical application like ours, reducing CPU interrupts and utilizing true hardware-level Jumbo Frames is essential. My Questions: Is there an undocumented boot-arg or network sysctl parameter that permits overriding the AppleUserECM 1500 MTU hard-limit for 2.5G USB adapters on Apple Silicon? Are there any roadmap plans from the DriverKit/Networking team to re-enable standard Jumbo Frame negotiation for RTL8156 hardware using the generic ECM driver? If the answer to both is no, does Apple grant NetworkingDriverKit Entitlements to independent developers specifically for the purpose of writing custom hardware overrides to patch missing MTU features in the default ECM stack? Because AppleUserECM effectively acts as a gatekeeper to the underlying MAC/PHY capabilities of these modern USB NICs, any guidance on achieving wire-native MTU 9000 under the current DriverKit paradigm would be hugely appreciated. Thank you!

I am seeking clarification on whether the various driverkit entitlement families (com.apple.developer.driverkit.family.*) are available for development on my local Mac without requesting entitlements from Apple. My experience is inconsistent with public statements made by Apple, and I am wondering if there have been changes to development entitlements as of 2026. I am hoping there is something obvious that I have missed. At WWDC2022 Apple stated that "In MacOS... In fact, all DriverKit family entitlements are now available to use for development." On these very forums, Eskimo himself also suggested this was the case in 2024. However, my own experience has been that in my provisioning profile on my paid developer account, I am not able to obtain com.apple.developer.driverkit.family.networking for the purpose of developing a driver for unsupported hardware. As you can see, I do not have the networking entitlement: { .. "Entitlements" => { ... "com.apple.developer.driverkit" => true "com.apple.developer.driverkit.transport.usb" => [ 0 => { "idVendor" => "*" } ] And there appears to be no mechanism to add these entitlement:

Hi, We were planning on using DriverKit to develop a USB Driver on IOS for iPhone. Within the DriverKit website, it say 'IOS16.0+' which lead us to believe it was compatible with iPhones running IOS16.0+. However, it appears DriverKit is only available for iPads running iPadOS, and computers running macOS. Are there any alternatives that would allow us to create a device specific USB driver for an iPhone running IOS?

I have reference some related post for this issue: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode-16-release-notes#Foundation https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/762711 Unfortunately, I'm facing the similar issues even though using Xcode Version 16.2 (16C5032a). we have the following build environment: Xcode version: Xcode 16.2 (16C5032a) macOS Version: macOS 14.7.4 (23H420) Everything builds and install fine. But when attempting to plug on Device on macOS 14.7.4 it crashes immediately with what appears to be a missing Foundation symbol. Crashed Thread: 0 Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000 Termination Reason: Namespace DYLD, Code 4 Symbol missing Symbol not found: __ZThn48_N21IOUserNetworkEthernet25registerEthernetInterfaceE10ether_addrPP24IOUserNetworkPacketQueuejP29IOUserNetworkPacketBufferPoolS5_ Referenced from: <ECE57ABF-0633-3C3B-8427-FB25CC706343> /Library/SystemExtensions/*/com.asix.dext.pciedevice Expected in: <CDEB3490-B1E0-3D60-80CE-59C0682A4B03> /System/DriverKit/System/Library/Frameworks/NetworkingDriverKit.framework/NetworkingDriverKit (terminated at launch; ignore backtrace) Thread 0 Crashed: 0 dyld 0x1041da4c8 __abort_with_payload + 8 1 dyld 0x1041e50cc abort_with_payload_wrapper_internal + 104 2 dyld 0x1041e5100 abort_with_payload + 16 3 dyld 0x1041767f0 dyld4::halt(char const*, dyld4::StructuredError const*) + 304 4 dyld 0x1041732ec dyld4::prepare(dyld4::APIs&, dyld3::MachOAnalyzer const*) + 3888 5 dyld 0x104171ef4 start + 1868 Thread 0 crashed with ARM Thread State (64-bit): x0: 0x0000000000000006 x1: 0x0000000000000004 x2: 0x000000016bdd2810 x3: 0x0000000000000172 x4: 0x000000016bdd2410 x5: 0x0000000000000000 x6: 0x000000016bdd1400 x7: 0x000000016bdd1460 x8: 0x0000000000000020 x9: 0x000000016bdd237c x10: 0x000000000000000a x11: 0x0000000000000000 x12: 0x0000000000000038 x13: 0x0000000000000000 x14: 0x0000000188e77f9d x15: 0x0000000000008000 x16: 0x0000000000000209 x17: 0x000000010416f37c x18: 0x0000000000000000 x19: 0x0000000000000000 x20: 0x000000016bdd2410 x21: 0x0000000000000172 x22: 0x000000016bdd2810 x23: 0x0000000000000004 x24: 0x0000000000000006 x25: 0x00000000000000a8 x26: 0x000000016bdd32d8 x27: 0x000000010405e090 x28: 0x0000000000000001 fp: 0x000000016bdd23e0 lr: 0x00000001041e50cc sp: 0x000000016bdd23a0 pc: 0x00000001041da4c8 cpsr: 0x80001000 far: 0x0000000000000000 esr: 0x56000080 Address size fault Binary Images: 0x10416c000 - 0x1041f7fff dyld (*) <4fe051cf-29dc-3f02-890b-33144fa09253> /usr/lib/dyld 0x10402c000 - 0x10403ffff com.asix.dext.pciedevice (0.1.6) <ece57abf-0633-3c3b-8427-fb25cc706343> /Library/SystemExtensions/*/com.asix.dext.pciedevice 0x0 - 0xffffffffffffffff ??? (*) <00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000> ??? External Modification Summary: Calls made by other processes targeting this process: task_for_pid: 0 thread_create: 0 thread_set_state: 0 Calls made by this process: task_for_pid: 0 thread_create: 0 thread_set_state: 0 Calls made by all processes on this machine: task_for_pid: 0 thread_create: 0 thread_set_state: 0 VM Region Summary: ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=8612K resident=0K(0%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=8612K(100%) Writable regions: Total=12.2M written=0K(0%) resident=0K(0%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=12.2M(100%) Is it expected that this should work? Is this a known issue? Is there any workaround for it? Should I file feedback or a DTS?

I would like to know if macOS DEXT supports the following networking features: Tx/Rx Multiqueue, RSS, RSC, NS/ARP offload, PTP or packet timestamping and TSN. I couldn't find relevant documentation for these features in the Apple Developer Documentation. If they are supported, could you let me know which features are supported and how to find the corresponding official Apple documentation? Thanks

I am developing a USB networking accessory using the CDC ECM or NCM protocol and I would like to know what are the MacOS and iPadOS requirements to connect to such a device. I have a prototype CDC ECM device developed that uses static IPv4 addressing which I can connect to an Arch Linux host and ping, but I am unable to have the same success from my Mac Studio M1 running Sequoia 15.1.1. The device shows up under 'Other Services' with 'Not connected' status, whether I leave it with the default settings or change it to 'Configure IPv4 -> Manually' and then set the appropriate IP address / Subnet mask / Router. From a discussion on Github, it seems that the ECM device must support NetworkConnection notification in order to work with MacOS. Can you point me to where this is documented and whether there are other expectations/requirements around USB network adapters? My end goal is to make an embedded device that communicates to MacOS and iPadOS devices/apps over USB CDC NCM with a simple UDP socket listener. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

PLATFORM AND VERSION iOS Development environment: Xcode 15.4, macOS Sonoma 14.5 Run-time configuration: macOS Sonoma 14.5 DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM Hi, I'm on DriverKit 21.0. I'm looking for a system call (that isn't deprecated) in my driver to set the Ethernet link speed manually. Normally a user would set it by System Settings... -> Network -> -> Details -> Hardware -> Configure (Manually), and then Speed (choose the link speed). With my driver, when I configure for manual, no link speeds show up. I want to know how to populate the speeds (1000BaseT, etc.) so a user can select one. What system APIs are used for this? I can't find much detail in the documentation. I do see Instance Methods for some related things like getSupportedMediaArray, but most of these newer methods don't have details in the documentation to guide me on what they actually do. Thanks in advance...

I was seeing APNS traffic not honor the networking routing table and instead forced onto a specific interface starting in the beta releases of macOS Sequoia. I wanted to ask here to see if it was by design. Were there any release notes or communication in regards to this change? I can imagine it being an intentional fix for some issue that Apple customers ran into, but I can also imagine this could be unintentional or a bug, so I wanted to double check. Thank you

Hi, I'm trying to test the NetworkingDriverKitSampleApp at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkingdriverkit/connecting_a_network_driver for a while but I couldn't reach the final steps described in the documentation. My setup: Xcode 15.4, MacBook Pro M3 with Sonoma 14.5, SIP is disabled. I prepared the required provisinning profiles with required entitelements. Dext and app builds successfully. Build path starts with "/Applications". "Install Dext" operation is successful without any error after allowing necessary permission. However, neither System Settings shows any new enXX interface, nor ioreg command shows a registered service while "systemextensionctl list" shows the expected result as a com.apple.system_extension.driver_extension record with [ activated enabled ]. I repeated the same steps for "Driver Kit Sample" at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit/driverkit_sample_code, "Install Dext" step succesful but "Communicate With Dext" results in "Driver is not connected" message. Similar to previous project, ioreg doesn't show any service for the dext while systemextensionctl lists [activeted enabled]. I also test an updated version of DriverKitSample at https://github.com/DanBurkhardt/DriverKitUserClientSample, which reproduced the same results. Finally, my device experiences seldom crashes after passing sleep state when the dext remains installed; where crash report points "IOReg". Is there any lacking steps on Apple documentation for Sonoma 14.5 or XCode 15.4 versions? Thanks.

Hi, I'm trying to test "https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkingdriverkit/connecting_a_network_driver" on MacBook Pro M3 with 14.5 Sonoma, XCode 15.4, SIP is disabled. Build steps are succesful, after running App, "Install Dext" is succesful, there is no error in XCode; "systemextensionctl list" show a record for "com.apple.system_extension.driver_extension" with [ activated enabled ] tag. But, "ioreg" doesn't show any service for the dext; and no new interface with name "enXX" appears in System Settings in contrast to what the document describes. In addition, seldomly my device experiences crash when the dext remains installed where crash report points "IOReg" function. I tried also Driver Kit Sample ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit/driverkit_sample_code ) and a github project based on this sample having last commits 9 months ago. However, Dext installation reveals similar behavior and "Communicate with Dext" step is unsuccessful with the message "Driver is not connected". Is there an updated version of Networking Driver Kit documentation to reach a running sample app for Sonoma 14.5? Thanks.

Hi, I'm responsible for extending my company's Firewall application with MacOS support. The easiest and fastest way requires a simple API similar to netmap/nfq in Unix/Linux systems or NDIS/WinDivert in Windows platform where All network traffic passing NIC's or WiFi adapter should beforwarded to our FW application, FW application should process the raw packets with its own connection tracking mechanism, modify them if needed, generate new ones if needed, FW application should inject forwarded or new packets to continue their ways. In other words, the required API should stand between NIC/WiFi driver and networking stack and allow packet manipulation. My questions follow: I can't decide on which method to focus further, throughout three alternatives; kext - It can satisfy the requirements, but deprecated, difficult to progress and have no guarantee to be applicable in future versions of MacOS, am I right ? networkingdriverkit - It can satisfy the requirements, am I right ? networkextension - can it satisfy the requirements? Also there is a serious performance problem as mentioned in https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/757071. Can anyone help me to decide on the most proper method for? Thanks.

The link is as follows: app store: monitor+ I have checked the header file for USB in the IOKit framework of macOS, but it does not exist in iOS. Is it necessary to collaborate with Apple to implement functions similar to monitor+(PTP control camera)?

Since the update to Ventura (Cleaninstall), network adapters reach 1000 Mbit via USB-C max. MacBookPro 16, M1max; Ventura 13.2 I use a 10GBit network, which worked very well under Monterey. I had an OWC network adapter 10 GB in use. Since the update to Ventura, several tried adapters reach max 1000Mbit. I tried the following: OWC Thunderbolt 3 10G Ethernet Adapter WAVLINK USB3.0/USB C to 2.5G Ethernet Adapter D-Link DUB-E250 USB-C to 2.5G Ethernet Adapter Anker PowerExpand USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter All max 1000 Mbit. With the OWC adapter, even a wrong IP was always assigned by the router via DHCP. For the others, at least that works. Although only max. 1000 Mbit, but that's annoying, because we installed a 10 GBit architecture in the office, which also cost money. And now max 1000 Mbit are in it. I have also tried everything else, as some manufacturers installed the drivers. But that wasn't possible either. The installer said that the installation was successful, but after rebooting and reconnecting, the same driver version was displayed. I suspect that Apple must have taken them all out, and blocked all new drivers. Blocking is OK, but it has to be from Apple as it was the case under Monterey? By the way, the hotline recommends downgrading to Monterey. Does anyone know more? Because otherwise I can only do a downgrade.

I am writing a NetworkingDriverKit extension. So I subclassed IOUserNetworkEthernet. In my class Start method, among hardware specific things here is what I do: Allocate a IOUserNetworkPacketBufferPool, with IOUserNetworkPacketBufferPool::Create(this, "myPacketsPool", 5000, 5000, 10000, &ivars->PacketsPool); Create an IODispatchQueue with IODispatchQueue::Create("myPacketsDispatchQueue", 0, 0, &ivars->PacketsDispatchQueue); Create the IOUserNetworkPacketQueue objects: IOUserNetworkRxSubmissionQueue::Create(ivars->PacketsPool, this, 250, 0, ivars->PacketsDispatchQueue, &ivars->RxSubmissionQueue); IOUserNetworkRxCompletionQueue::Create(ivars->PacketsPool, this, 250, 0, ivars->PacketsDispatchQueue, &ivars->RxCompletionQueue); IOUserNetworkTxSubmissionQueue::Create(ivars->PacketsPool, this, 250, 0, ivars->PacketsDispatchQueue, &ivars->TxSubmissionQueue); IOUserNetworkTxCompletionQueue::Create(ivars->PacketsPool, this, 250, 0, ivars->PacketsDispatchQueue, &ivars->TxCompletionQueue); queues[0] = ivars->RxSubmissionQueue; queues[1] = ivars->RxCompletionQueue; queues[2] = ivars->TxSubmissionQueue; queues[3] = ivars->TxCompletionQueue; I register the ethernet interface: RegisterEthernetInterface(mac, ivars->PacketsPool, queues, 4); And I report link status with ReportLinkStatus(kIOUserNetworkLinkStatusActive, kIOUserNetworkMediaEthernet1000BaseT | kIOUserNetworkMediaOptionFullDuplex); After that, the new network interface shows up in MacOS. I see that SetInterfaceEnable gets called with true as argument. In the receive data path I get data from the USB device, which I want to pass to the network stack. So I try to get an empty packet with: IOUserNetworkPacket * packet; r = ivars->RxSubmissionQueue->DequeuePacket(&packet); But at that point, I always get kIOReturnUnderrun. Is there something else I should do to be able to dequeue empty packets from the IOUserNetworkRxSubmissionQueue ? I already tried to enable the packets queues with: ivars->RxSubmissionQueue->SetEnable(true); ivars->RxCompletionQueue->SetEnable(true); ivars->TxSubmissionQueue->SetEnable(true); ivars->TxCompletionQueue->SetEnable(true); But that doesn't change anything.

All dequed packets from sumbmission queues are enqued properly to completion queue after posting to stack. But After running heavy traffic (running iperf -b 1000m) for few times, dequeue fails and always return 0. When I check error code with dequeuePacket API it gets error 2e7. (which is underrun error) Why dequeue fails?

ipad lock screen app cut to background hang after unlocking and restoring the app may lead to several minutes of inability to connect to LAN devices XCode 13.2.1 iPad ios 15.4.1

I have purchased the USB C hub by gravity and it has the ethernet port which is not appearing in my network settings. I have tried to see if it could be added but cant find anything. I have heard people talk about drivers but not sure what drivers or even if i need them. They dont say anything on the gravity website. Can anyone help?

I've been creating a virtual ethernet interface. I've opened asynchronous communication with a controlling application and every time there are new packets, the controlling app is notified and then asks for the packet data. The packet data is stored in a simple struct, with uint8_t[1600] for the bytes, and uint32_t for the length. The dext is able to populate this struct with dummy data every time a packet is available, with the dummy data visible on the controlling application. However, I'm struggling to fill it with the real packet data. The IOUserNetworkPacket provides metadata about a packet. It contains a packets timestamp, size, etc, but it doesn't seem to contain the packet's data. There are the GetDataOffset() and GetMemorySegmentOffset() methods which seem to return byte offsets for where the packet data is located in their memory buffer. My instinct tells me to add this offset to the pointer of wherever the packet data is stored. The problem is I have no idea where the packets are actually stored. I know they are managed by the IOUserNetworkPacketBufferPool, but I don't think that's where their memory is. There is the CopyMemoryDescriptor() method which gives an IOMemoryDescriptor of its contents. I tried using the descriptor to create an IOMemoryMap, using it to call GetAddress(). The pointers to all the mentioned objects lead to junk data. I must be approaching this entirely wrong. If anyone knows how to access the packet data, or has any ideas, I would appreciate any help. Thanks.