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Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X
MojoKid (1002251) writes One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when it's sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD's real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It's conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver.
OSX has always disabled TRIM. What's new is that they're stricter about what you can load into the system, and that prevents a hack people had been using to re-enable it from working.
Apple loves their walled garden, but doesn't make decisions like this capriciously. Until we know *why* Apple's doing this, it's hard to judge the situation. They may have a reason that seems insignificant to the end user, but you don't get to be the biggest company on the planet by making decisions like this for no reason.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Try replacing a HDD without having your system fan turn into a jet place. Yes, I know there are third party software for fan-control. Why isn't there software for fan-control from Apple? Why isn't there better hardware fan control from Apple?
If you read the rest of the article, you find that you can simply disable the driver loading security to have it working again.
The article paints this as a huge security issue, but why? Anyone putting in a custom SSD is also probably technically astute enough not to download a KEXT that ostensibly puts a cat following your cursor or what have you.
Cn anyone reasonably argue that having a system highly secure for non-technical users with easy workarounds for actually technical users is a bad compromise? The people who are not technical need all the help they can get.
Also - couldn't you actually just sign the drivers that are needed for trim? What prevents that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It can be done if you're willing to disable kext security check
see http://www.cindori.org/trim-en...
Seems like OP is trying to fit the narrative that Apple is evil and hates everyone. My hunch is that this topic was raised since it came up on the Accidental Tech Podcast and perhaps OP hasn't listened to this week's episode where this topic was clarified. If OP *has* listened to this week's episode and is just leaving off the relevant information, shame on OP. The reason trim support is disabled on third party SSDs, and this comes from a former Apple engineer according to the ATP podcast, is that Apple is being conservative as not all drives pay attention to trim commands in the same way. What it comes down to is that if a drive has "wonky trim" or trim in a manner that the OS isn't expecting it, you can have actual data loss if trim isn't done correctly. Apple isn't in the business of going out and testing and certifying every third party SSD on the planet and they drew the line somewhere is all. Also, many modern SSD controllers, while they won't do trim as that command comes from the OS, do perform much better over time as they have improved wear leveling. Given the improved reliability of flash memory and SSDs in general, I'd be curious to see the actual MTBF for a non trim-enabled drive running modern firmware.
Apple has never enabled TRIM on non-OEM SSDs, which is probably the conservative and correct thing to do. If you're clever enough to install a new SSD, you're clever enough to enable it on your own (and presumably to know whether you should enable it, and whether it's even a benefit for your particular drive).
The current workaround involved a single software vendor who didn't sign their kexts. Apple's new security policy won't let you load random unsigned kernel modules unless you explicitly turn off the signature checking. While this is inconvenient for me personally - because I have a 3rd-party SSD and I used that software myself - on whole, I'd rather have a more secure OS than the dubious benefit of a possibly slightly faster SSD.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It always amazes me that people still try to bash Microsoft over the (bad) things they did in the 90s. Apple has become everything we always feared Microsoft would be, but without all the backlash and bashing. This is truly a "We're not done until 3rd party stuff doesn't work" situation that everyone always suggested MS had (and MS probably did have to some extent). They are purposely disabling an industry standard for anything other than their drivers to force people to use their overpriced upgrade hardware. Yes, you can disable this "feature" but to do so you have to disable ALL driver signing on the system, thus removing a big security protection. Apple is by far one of the worst companies as far as policies and screwing people, and yet no one ever seems to say much about it even as people still write Micro$oft. Maybe it's because there isn't a cute little way to put a dollar sign in their name.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I look forward to posts from all those who decried the "Microsoft-sponsred" secure boot UEFI feature.
After all, at least with the former you could turn it off or add your own key to boot what you like.
The latter is merely a giant F U from Tim Cook to anyone who does not purchase Apple OEM or Apple-approved hardware.
See http://blog.macsales.com/21641... for an example of a properly designed SSD.
kext signing is a GoodThing for security. Making the system less secure so that lazy implementors are protected isn't a good trade off.
Apple *should* have provided a better upgrade experience so that users wouldn't be surprised, or end up with unbootable systems. Users that don't want to have kext protection CAN turn it off see http://www.cindori.org/trim-en...
To me this is akin to Apple's desupport of WPS ages ago. It took everyone else a while to figure out that WPS was a major security hole (indeed, its still there for most consumers).
that are needed for trim? What prevents that? Likely just time. But that doesn't make for an alarming headline.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Please read up on what they are doing and see the big picture before rushing off to get your inflammatory article published.... And for goodness sake, stop cherry picking items out of the bigger context in support of your click bait.
Bottom Line - Apple is enforcing driver signing, just like other OS's, like you mentioned. The net effect is that if your driver is not signed, it's not loaded. Get your driver signed and it gets loaded. This is a common security practice and a welcome one, IMHO. The average end user is not going to be well informed enough to determine if a driver KEXT should be installed or not, so I don't have an issue with a default policy preventing that from occurring. Yes, ONE of the effects is that the unsigned drivers for some SSDs are not being loaded. This does not however mean this is a direct attack on third party software, rather it's a preventative step for enhanced security. Of course for those well informed, there are ways to disable this. The kind of people who are most likely well informed enough to know what KEXT should be loaded are probably also the kind likely to install a third party SSD. So in the end, this is a grain of sand, made into a hill, click baited into a mount pseudo wannabe mountain....
Apple, for whatever dumb reason, has _never_ enabled Trim on non-Apple branded SSDs. I do not know of any HDD manufacturers that ever provided any kernel extensions that would enable Trim for their drives, so effectively, third-party SSDs have never had any official trim support on OS X.
Before Yosemite this has never been an issue. Any user who was able to install their own SSD could also download the handy TRIM Enabler software that forced Trim on for non-Apple SSDs. One toggle switch, one reboot, piece of cake. I've been running multiple Macs since OS 10.6 with multiple brands of SSDs (OCZ, Samsung, Intel, etc) with absolutely no issues and no signs of performance degradation.
The difference in Yosemite is, as the summary says, non-signed Kernel extensions cannot be loaded by default. Since non-signed kexts are blocked, software like Trim Enabler cannot load. You CAN override this behavior, but there are potential issues (see the Trim Enabler site for more information).
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the decision to make Yosemite require signed kexts has anything to do with the status of trim on non-Apple SSDs. I doubt trim even crossed anybody's minds during the decision-making process. Trim Enabler is just an unfortunate casualty of kext signing (which itself is probably not a bad thing!).
tl;dr -- a rather hysterical take on an issue that DOES display some Apple stupidity. Just let us enable trim on non-Apple drives natively and there's no problem!
Please read up on what they are doing and see the big picture before rushing off to get your inflammatory article published.... And for goodness sake, stop cherry picking items out of the bigger context in support of your click bait.
Bottom Line - Apple is enforcing driver signing, just like other OS's, like you mentioned. The net effect is that if your driver is not signed, it's not loaded. Get your driver signed and it gets loaded. This is a common security practice and a welcome one, IMHO. The average end user is not going to be well informed enough to determine if a driver KEXT should be installed or not, so I don't have an issue with a default policy preventing that from occurring. Yes, ONE of the effects is that the unsigned drivers for some SSDs are not being loaded. This does not however mean this is a direct attack on third party software, rather it's a preventative step for enhanced security. Of course for those well informed, there are ways to disable this. The kind of people who are most likely well informed enough to know what KEXT should be loaded are probably also the kind likely to install a third party SSD. So in the end, this is a grain of sand, made into a hill, click baited into a mount pseudo wannabe mountain....
third party software, should be third party hardware...
Sell your Apple stock now. Apple has plateaued.
hadn't shown multiple vendors who can't implement TRIM properly. Like the very popular SSD vendor whose firmware treated any TRIM as "TRIM all blocks" several years ago. Or the currently-shipping vendor whose firmware causes TRIM to delete a random block.
I've been using multiple SSDs without TRIM for years and they work just fine. Is Slashdot making a headline out of an issue that is really the difference of 1% in performance?
It isn't really true that SSD performance goes down by a whole lot if TRIM is not enabled. SSD performance and firmware has undergone radical improvements every year and people have come to the mistaken belief that enabling TRIM is responsible for most of the performance and wear leveling improvements.
TRIM has numerous problems, not the least of which being drives and/or filesystems which do not implement it properly. Because its use and effects can be seriously non-deterministic (even in a proper implementation), any bug in the drive firmware OR the filesystem in the use of TRIM can create serious corruption issues down the line when the drive actually decides to blow away some of the trimmed sectors. The TRIM command was badly conceived from the get-go.
The easiest and safest solution to getting 95% of the benefit of TRIM without actually using TRIM is to simply partition a factory fresh drive to leave a bit of unused space at the end... say another 5-10%. As long as it isn't written to, the drive will use that space as part of its dynamic wear leveling mechanic. As long as the drive also does static wear leveling (which nearly all will do these days), you wind up with nearly all the benefit of TRIM without having to actually use TRIM. TRIM was more important in the days where static wear leveling was not well implemented (or implemented at all). It is less useful these days.
-Matt
Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult.
If they're adopting standards, then shouldn't that make using third-party hardware easier, since that hardware merely has to be standard-compliant?
Do you know if this applies to the Samsung 840 EVO series?
Seriously, look at this fellow's posts. Doesn't matter what Apples does, it is not their fault, or it is their fault but it's Apple, so there is a good and just reason.
I just understand this mindset. TRIM has been around for a long time now and it works. Plain and simple. It has worked perfectly on my mac after I enabled with a 3rd party hack.
No, this is only a clamp down in order for force you to buy their SSD for double the price.
I am 100% positive if MS sold SDDs and suddenly blocked TRIM, this turkey would be screaming at the top of his lung about power grabs and anti-competitive actions. But, since we are talking about Apple....
How do we disable this driver check? i mean, its all about the SUDO...
Also - couldn't you actually just sign the drivers that are needed for trim? What prevents that?
Getting "permission" to sign a KEXT (from Apple) requires agreeing to some onerous requirements, and convincing Apple that you have a justified (to Apple) need, and paying an Apple tax for being part of the approved clique. Perhaps some 3rd party SSD vendors will choose to pay the Apple tax (and gain market share by a "works with Apple" marketing campaign). Perhaps not.
There are likely devices with various firmware glitches, that Apple's drivers can't properly support. Rather than implement workarounds for broken devices, it looks like Apple is just disabling TRIM for these devices. If you want proper support for a variety of hardware, you don't use an Apple operating system, so it won't impact many people in the real world - just those of us who have to occasionally support these black sheep of the computing world.
Keep buying that crApple fanbois.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Get your driver signed
By whom? Can the owner of a Mac choose which code signing certificate authorities to trust? If not, how does that inability benefit the computer's users?
TRIM support has NOT been removed. Apple simply cannot guarantee that it will work with *any* drive other than those they certify. Companies like DELL and HP do exactly the same thing.
The latest episode of ATP (www.atp.fm), they heard from an Apple Engineer that Apple disables it because most makes of SSD are very inconsistent on how the TRIM command is executed. And Apple being Apple, they don't particularly want to try every SSD known to man to "support" them.
Best bet is to use a drive with a controller than does it for you. I'm sporting SSDs from OWC and I haven't had any issues in speed and I've had them for over two years now.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
Hard drives preloaded with malware would be a problem, but that's not what this is about. Hardware drivers run as part of the operating system kernel. If you get malware (or just buga) in your kernel, you're screwed. There's no way for any anti-malware system to detect or remove it because the security software has to get it's information from the kernel. So it is very important to protect the kernel.
In order to protect the kernel from malicious or crappy code, it won't load any untrusted modules as part of the kernel. Since device drivers are kernel modules which become part of the kernel, they must be trusted (signed) or they aren't loaded.
So there is a balance here - there is a good reason to not run any random code as part of the kernel, but that has the effect of using only the default OSX driver unless the drive manufacturer gets their driver signed. That means drive-specific features don't work without a signed driver.
Unfortunately, drive manufacturers screwed up trim support, so it ended up being a drive-specific feature. You can't just call trim() per the standard without knowing how that specific drive handles it. Some drives will lose data if you do.
At the endof the day, that's the cause of the problem - drive manufacturers sold hardware that would lose data if used according to the standard.
Never bought an Apple product, never will.
When will the rest of you RETARDS figure it out and stop giving money to the biggest group of corporate thieves ever?
kext-dev-mode=1
How about third party drivers? Seems like vendors will have to release some if they intend to sell to apple victims.
feel free to buy something other than a Mac.
I think I will make apple product owners wait 3 extra rings before answering.
Maby I can even move non apple users up the queue. That'd be fun!
The generic MS drivers know how to see if the drive supports TRIM and send the commands if it does. That's the point of TRIM: It is an ATA standard command, so special software isn't needed.
In fact, in Windows all you use is the generic drivers. I mean you may install drivers for your SATA controller, but not for your drive. My laptop has a Samsung 840 Pro in it, with Samsung's Magician installed. However the drivers in use are disk.sys, partmgr.sys (both Microsoft files) and iastorf.sys (Intel's file). No Samsung provided drivers. Magician can directly send commands to optimize the drive if needed if the OS can't, but the OS sends TRIM commands no problem.
I've not checked if things have changed, but I seem to recall that Ubuntu only enable TRIM on known good drives. The reason being that there were a number of problematic drives that would result in data-loss if TRIM was used.
So.... maybe Apple are being cautious?
I've been primarily a Mac user since 1999 or 2000, and I've watched the serviceability of Apple's machines go back and forth over the years. Before they moved to the Intel processor, you often had very limited options to do anything with the configuration you purchased, even when the machine in question was a tower type desktop computer. RAM was generally not an issue, although Apple sometimes required very specific timing for the DIMM modules - limiting what you could put in. But certainly, upgraded video was a problem (very limited in which cards could be used as upgrades - including cases like the G4 Cube where some cards were physically too long to fit, even if they'd work otherwise). Laptops like the iBook G4 were notoriously difficult to take apart for service. I remember replacing a bad hard drive in one for a guy I used to work for, and it was at least a 2 hour long job for me with screws all over the place. After that, I understood why repair shops would quote such high labor rates when you asked about an iBook repair.
Then I watched things go the opposite direction. The newer Macbooks and Pros became increasingly easy to work on, so you could unscrew the bottom plate and have instant access to everything -- or just remove a small plate to get to the RAM slots. Batteries became removable from the bottom by just sliding an unlock switch. Even the iMac was easy to upgrade at one point (hard drive right there once you took the back cover off, and no need to do more than unscrew a couple screws on the bottom to get to the SO-DIMM memory).
But it's now swinging back to the "non serviceable" mode again, with the pentalobe screws trying to keep people out, soldered RAM on the motherboards, and having to take the whole glass and LCD screens out of iMacs to work on them.
Truthfully, I don't think the TRIM support for non-Apple branded SSDs is that big of a deal. It's been known for quite a while now that Apple wasn't including TRIM support for 3rd. party drives -- and there's even one 3rd. party SSD coming out now with TRIM functionality built into its firmware, so OS X doesn't need to have support to do it. You can turn off the feature in OS X that verifies you're only using signed KEXTs and get the custom ones to work for TRIM support too.
But sure, it's annoying .... and I'm not going to make apologies for Apple about any of this. We still use their products where I work and none of this will make us stop. (As long as you have a warranty, you just hand it back to Apple when it breaks and it's their problem. If you still need it and the warranty is up? Fine... you pay up and let Apple service it and hand it back to you again. Their repair prices have actually gone down in recent years, as they've made more products reliant on them to service them.) Home users are the ones who get the short end of the deal though, as money is more of a problem for us and we tend to buy lesser configurations of machines to save money up front -- intending to add to it later. With Apple, that's becoming a poor decision.
"One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM".
Do please explain the logic in Apple not making it's own hardware working the best with it's own software and why there is nowhere on the planet where we can buy a 'traditional PC OEM' without Microsoft Windows being unwanted and included and why slashdot doesn't deem this as total vendor lockin.
Nobody is forced to buy their stuff. People who choose to buy deserve being treated like this.
It is pretty clear what apple thinks of their users, and they are right.
"The latest batch of high-performance Solid State Drives will last longer and perform better down the line in a Windows PC than a Mac PC!"
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
Right, but drive vendors could sign a driver and supply it with the hardware, they just choose not to do so because the vast majority of bare SSDs are sold for Windows boxes where Microsoft's driver is not picky about TRIM support.
It is against the law to require the purchase of one product in order to purchase another, and it is also illegal to require purchasing maintenance and repair parts from the manufacturer, or to degrade performance of a product for using non-manufacturer repair/maintenance parts.
This is why auto manufacturers are forbidden requiring you use their oils, fluids, and parts to maintain warranty. This is also why cable providers are getting smacked for requiring you to lease a box to receive their TV service.
This is no different, and someone will probably be suing in short order, if the FTC doesn't just go ahead and issue a finding on its own.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
Yes, you can. People are already making kext-modification scripts and other tools that get around the signing.
This is pretty much a non-issue.
Getting "permission" to sign a KEXT (from Apple)
What gives Apple the right to decide what one can do with their computer? If I want to allow a particular KEXT to run, I should be allowed to. Microsoft asks for every unsigned driver if I wish to allow the installation. Why can Apple not support driver approval by the user? Or does Apple actually believe that it knows better?
Apple didn't disable TRIM. They just tightened up security around Kernel modifications.
I did 3 things to my desktop in October.
1.Updated it to OSX10.10
2.Bought and installed my first SSD.
3.Installed a 3rd party TRIM driver and in doing so switched off OSX10.10's kernel security so it would be unhindered.
Then I read today "Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X".
Talk about BS...
Slashdot.org should be renamed "linuxandroidgeek.religion"
It's pathetic, it's bad enough with main stream media having political bias without technology media getting all one sided.
I have a 2009 Macbook running Yosemite. Note this machine was not available with SSD at the time it was sold. A year ago I decided to put an SSD in it, and being aware of the TRIM issue, I made a point to buy a secondhand *Apple* SSD from a Macbook Pro. Neither Mavericks nor Yosemite will enable TRIM on this machine.
So apparently, not only will OS X not enable TRIM on a non-Apple SSD, but the machine *must* be a model for which there was an SSD option at purchase.
I don't see this as anything more then Apple being Apple. Heck, I remember when Apple was using Power PC chips in Mac's. Now that required far more specialized hardware then today when Intel chips rule Mac's. Come on, look at Firewire, Thunderbolt, proprietary connectors, and you begin to understand the mentality of Apple.
They want you to stay close to the Apple garden and not go too far from the Apple ecosystem. Its always been that way, and probably always will.
The situation is the same that has been since apple supports TRIM, the only difference is, like other says, that to make 3rd party SSDs work with trim you'll have to disable device signing. That is not a "huge" security risk since that is a feature that you have from 10.10, so you are exposed to threat as you where before 10.10.... Plz remember that to disable kext signing you need the same privileges you need to replace a modified kext, so I don't see kext signing useful at all, and I disabled it on my two macs (both with 3rd party SSDs) that happily TRIM under 10.10....
You are entirely correct if we are speaking of the standard, non-queued version of TRIM. There is no valid technical explanation for not issuing that to third-party SSDs, no consumer will blame something other than the crap SSD if that malfunctions. But standard TRIM requires the entire queue to be drained, so it really should be done only in "batch mode" when the filesystem is otherwise idle, not synchronously.
However, if Apple decided to issue the queued version of TRIM (yes, it exists, and Linux uses it), you will quickly find that you REALLY should not trust SSD makers other than Intel in the desktop market, and a *few* selected vendors in the enterprise market, *ever*.
while that I/O operation is being done, that's going to mean some other I/O operation isn't
There are plenty of times that a disk isn't actively in use. Say you stand up and get a coffee or use the toilet, and your PC is either idle or in the middle of a CPU-bound task that doesn't use a lot of disk, and it's plugged into its AC adapter (so that you aren't wasting battery power). During this time, your file system can either trim or zero out recently deallocated sectors without noticeably affecting other applications that use the disk.
For small erase sizes, writing zeros would be much, much faster if only the SSD spec specifically stated that writing zeros would have a TRIM effect. But it doesn't.
Some SSD makers' specs do state as such. See this description of how the controller in an OWC SSD works, which I found via this comment to the present story. The DuraWrite feature of SandForce SSD controllers stores trailing zeroes in a sector with a more efficient compressed encoding, which reduces write amplification in the same way that TRIM does.
Yes, but that requires the filesystem to zero out all redundant data.
The difference is that zeroing is well defined even on devices that don't support TRIM (such as HDDs) and on devices whose implementation of TRIM is defective.
For performance reasons most filesystems just note that it is unused in their metadata tables.
Then zeroing can be a deferred background task, much as TRIM is. So if Apple restricts TRIM to only those SSDs where it has comprehensively tested TRIM, Apple could add a policy of background zeroing on other drives. It could even play up the feature as "More secure Trash" or something like that.
Can't you read or are you deliberately lying? From the very page you point to:
As I was saying: signing prevents modifying kernel extensions. That's the whole point!
When I saw the title of the thread I just knew. This behavior is total unacceptable and would be considered anti-competitive if another company did it, but I just knew that this thread would be full of Apple apologists trying to explain that this was OK because Apple. I was right.
What other company would you give a Big Thumbs Up to for refusing to install drivers for third-party hardware because SOME drivers MAY be implemented poorly? Or make it difficult to install a competitor's software? Microsoft? It was a major scandal that they INCLUDED their own software (IE), let alone if they were to actively suppress the competition's.
It's unclear that they could even if they wanted to. The Apple driver is already managing those devices and they all go through the same controller. In addition, writing a good storage driver is a lot of work, work third party vendors shouldn't have to go through just to add a standard piece of hardware to a system.
This kind of deliberate incompatibility is nothing new either. Apple was playing the same games with incompatibility of disk drives back to early Macintosh days.
I got a Wintec ExpressCard SSD for my 17 inch Macbook Pro and suffered through multiple rounds of filesystem corruption before realizing it's caused by trim enabler. I think this is a correct decision for vast majority of users. For the rest, there is an option of disabling kext signing.
DISCALIMER: This is a personal, nonprofessional opinion. It is not legal advice. Ask your lawyer. I am not one.
Specifically adding code to diminish capability without adding any counterbalancing benefit sounds like restraint of trade to me. In the USA, that's illegal.
If you customize your apple hardware, get ready to move in to unsupported territory. Apple doesn't care about your minority use case.
If you want customized hardware, don't buy Apple.
Most people don't care about customized hardware. Apple designs for most people.
I'll take "deliberately lying" for $300, Alex.
Angelbird SSDs have native Mac TRIM support, I upgraded my MacBook Pro with an Angelbird SSD wrk for Mac, I've updated to Yosemite and it confirmed in the System Settings that TRIM is enabled, which is very important for conserving the life of the SSD. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...
So disable the kext signing and stop crying.
sudo nvram boot-args=kext-dev-mode=1
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
TRIM is already implemented in firmware; what the OS sends to the drive are "hints" indicating blocks which have become free and require clearing. Without the OS sending those hints I don't see how the SSD would know which blocks are safe to clear; doing so requires reading the drive's file system, which is why the OS has always been involved.
Getting "permission" to sign a KEXT (from Apple)
What gives Apple the right to decide what one can do with their computer? If I want to allow a particular KEXT to run, I should be allowed to. Microsoft asks for every unsigned driver if I wish to allow the installation. Why can Apple not support driver approval by the user? Or does Apple actually believe that it knows better?
Because Apple's support includes supporting the entire solution - hardware and installed OS. When things go wrong they'll actually work with you to fix them rather than simply pointing fingers. Naturally this gives them a really strong incentive to make sure that both of those item continue to work in harmony; part of their approach to that is restricting the more arcane things that the majority of end-users don't have enough experience to do safely.
For anyone who has enough experience to know when to accept an unsigned kernel extension, there's a trivial command to allow it; I happen to agree that people who can't figure out how to enable unsigned drivers really shouldn't be installing them.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
This is WILLFUL DAMAGE of THE customer's OWN PROPERTY and hopefully charges WII be filed against these by all means criminal offences !
APPLE DESERVES A REAL VIOLENT SHAKEDOWN BY THE FEDS !
Can't you read or are you deliberately lying? From the very page you point to:
I can read quite well, thank you. But you seem to be having trouble. I was replying to this:
Also - couldn't you actually just sign the drivers that are needed for trim? What prevents that? Likely just time. But that doesn't make for an alarming headline.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
The reason I replied was that you are WRONG. Yes, you can. Or rather, you can simply bypass kext signing. It's easy enough.
To continue to use Trim Enabler and continue to get Trim for your third party SSD, you first need to disable the kext signing security setting.
... but apparently, you conveniently stopped there, rather than reading further where it said "Trim Enabler 3.3 will disable the kext-signing setting automatically for you..."
As I was saying: signing prevents modifying kernel extensions. That's the whole point!
And as *I* was saying, it's ridiculously easy to bypass. So technically no, you can't "sign your own drivers", but you can get around the requirement that they be signed at all. That's even easier, and the point I think GP was getting at.
As I was saying:
Illiterate, apparently.
From these greedy marketers
Illiterate, apparently.
No need to apologize.
No, signing does not prevent that, because signing can be bypassed. Is this clear? Do I need to state it a couple more different ways?
Jane demonstrates the extent of his literacy. Might want to re-read those words, cupcake.
I read them carefully enough.
Might want to go away, asshole.
Pardon my reply above.
To me, it looked like a sarcastic comment aimed at me.
But I could have been wrong.
If you actually had read them carefully enough, you wouldn't have told him "no need to apologize."
If you could actually read my mind, you would know why you were wrong about that.