How to check if your Apple Silicon Mac is booting securely

48 shorden 11 8/24/2025, 11:44:47 PM eclecticlight.co ↗

Comments (11)

ostensible · 7m ago
`man csrutil`
bduhan · 47m ago
I had to do this today for a Universal Audio Apollo audio interface. Glad it’s on a dedicated machine.

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057137692-Apple...

Barbing · 40m ago
Interesting. They need that for lowest-possible latency? And it should be fairly safe?
arcticbull · 20m ago
Assuming they're USB devices they shouldn't be a reason to do this... Apple moved third-party drivers for USB devices and audio HAL extensions to user space, so there's some minor overhead choosing DriverKit over IOKit. Everything I've dug up says it's low single digit percentages. I wouldn't be developing USB drivers against IOKit anymore personally and I'd be looking to move over pretty aggressively before Apple drops the hammer.
Barbing · 47m ago
Useful, thank you! Looks like the author just enjoys helping fellow nerds. Nice
8ig8 · 26m ago
Dr Howard Oakley. I think of him as an OG Mac guy.
userbinator · 1h ago
s/booting securely/running only the code Apple approves of/g
arcticbull · 16m ago
Not exactly, distribution conversation aside this is specific to kernel extensions. Apple's been moving drivers out of kernel space and into user space for several years [1]. There's a lot of good reasons for doing so, and not a lot of drawbacks. I'd consider this to be a strongly worded API deprecation notice.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/driverkit

bapak · 1h ago
You can run unverified code if you build it yourself. You can distribute unverified code by just paying $99/year to Apple. Not great, but still no need for specific code approval.
cyberax · 36m ago
Not if you want to use some features like bridged networking. For that you need to go and beg Apple for an entitlement. Or you have to disable SIP entirely.
Barbing · 32m ago
They respond to the begging as incredibly well as they respond to feedback/bug reports, right?