I upgraded to 10.15.4 this week, and when it launched for the first time I received numerous warnings of incompatibility of several extensions with “future macOS releases”, which I assume means 10.16. One of these future incompatibilities was Sophos.
So, just FYI for the MPU community, I checked with Sophos and found this
The other warnings beside Sophos were for software I do not use anymore, so it’s ok if 10.16 kills them.
I got a few warnings as well. Several tech podcasts had mentioned it this week. Sounds like kernel extensions will be going away in a future, possibly the next, major version of macOS.
I got a warning about Karabiner-Elements.
I will be very irritable if I lose the ability to remap CapsLock to Hyper and F18.
I also got a warming that the GoodNotes 5 Mac beta was unsigned, which is true. Seemed like an odd thing for an OS upgrade to be concerned about. Today, unsigned apps can be run on Catalina (and previous) by right-clicking, choosing Open, and giving permission. Maybe in 10.16 that feature is going away? Don’t know.
Same. But they made it work after ¿10.12? when Apple changed things, so I trust they are working on a fix for Snow Catalina or whatever it’s called.
You should 100% expect kernel extensions to die in 10.16. Apple has been signaling this for awhile. This alert is like the 32-bit app alert in Mojave: your last warning so you can’t say Apple didn’t tell you it was coming.
This may not only be a security boost, it may be another step towards ARM Macs. But of course that is just a guess.
I just hope Apple comes out with a low power mode as Marco Arment suggested at the same time, but I fear they won’t, because they will say “Intel who? Get a new Mac and you won’t need to worry about Low Power Mode.”
It seems there will be replacements for these kernel extensions that are a little safer than attaching things to the OS kernel. It also impacts users of TripMode, which posted to their blog this week that they would likely need to adopt the new Network Extension APIs to make their utilities continue to function on Snow Catalina. Hopefully the new APIs will allow for all the functions that these apps need. Also, hopefully Sophos will be slow to adapt and I will get rid of it on my university laptop…