Open Radar

 
07-Dec-2012 01:01 PM Rudy Richter:
Summary:
There is a severe deficiency in the implementation of CoreAudio device driver support as it pertains to sandboxing on 10.7 and 10.8.  The currently recommended ways for developers to ship their device drivers means that any application in the App Store is severely limited in being able to even output audio to these devices without special temporary entitlements for each device maker's driver class name specifically entered into their entitlements to even allow the io-kit open call to happen.

This pretty much limits the scope of any audio application one might ship in the store to consumer level devices(that leverage the included device drivers for usb and firewire audio) and the built-in audio hardware.

Steps to Reproduce:
Try to use a sandboxed audio application with any pro level hardware, which usually involves installing a kext and/or a HAL plugin.

Expected Results:
It should work and allow the user to use it as an output device

Actual Results:
the device doesn't even show up in the device list CoreAudio returns due to failure to io-kit open the device driver

Notes:
If this is simply a case where the new recommendation is to ship Audio Server plugins then i'd like to see developer relations put on a Dev Kitchen to get these device makers on board with the new driver model.  At a minimum you need to do better with regard the transition and consider having the CoreAudio framework bridge on behalf of the device driver makers in the short term so that application developers can continue to use their devices without having to enumerate every single potential device class in their entitlements files (and being forced to only ship their products developer id signed).