OS X and iOS Kernel Programming

Working with Processes in the Kernel

The BSD portion of the kernel provides a KPI for getting information about active processes in the system. Note that the term process is used in BSD as opposed to task, which is used in the Mach portion of the kernel, though they really refer to the same thing.

KERNEL PRIVATE KPIS

If you are digging around in the kernel headers, you may come across the preprocessor directive KERNEL_PRIVATE. Functions or other symbols defined within these sections are not available for use by third-party kernel extensions, and attempting to use one even if the correct header is included will result in a failure to load that KEXT due to unresolved symbols. Apple's own KEXTs are able to access these symbols by adding a dependency ...