How to ID the specific legacy systems extensions that will become problematic.

Welcome, ross97401, to Apple Support Communities!

You wrote:

After updating to macOS 12.3, several future problem legacy system extensions developers were listed, but not their specific product(s). While the developers were listed, some have multiple apps on my computer, how can I best determine exactly which ones will have a problem?

Unfortunately, no one, not even Apple, can know the future!

I’m not sure what this “future problem legacy system extensions developers” listing is actually about, but Apple has been warning that their macOS system may change, at some future date, in such a way that many current, third-party system extensions may not work, under such a (hypothetical) new macOS.

As to whether such warnings come to fruition, only time will tell, but will be dependent upon what Apple and third-party developers do in the future.

The best thing you can do is to always keep track of what applications, and, especially, system extensions and login-items, you have running on your system, and make sure you keep them up-to-date.

Unfortunately, it is quite easy to loose track of what system extensions have been installed on your system, especially since some application developers install system extensions “in the background”, without your explicit knowledge.

Even worse, more than anything else, we, here on Apple Support Communities, find that a large portion of people’s troubles, on their Macs, are due to system extensions (and login-items)—often ones that the user has forgotten about.

ross97401 wrote:

After updating to macOS 12.3, several future problem legacy system extensions developers were listed, but not their specific product(s). While the developers were listed, some have multiple apps on my computer, how can I best determine exactly which ones will have a problem?

You have to contact the developer of those products and ask. If you get no response, consider that to be a Big Red Flag.

One more command to list all the newer System Extensions which are different than traditional secure kernel extensions:

systemextensionsctl list

This one lists the extension identifier and the bundle ID codes which MacSysAdmins would need to know to whitelist these extensions as being trusted in an MDM managed Mac environment.

Some System Extensions might get flagged as insecure or with compatibility issues. Depends on how old the system extension is and how it was coded internally.



This command in Terminal will list all non-Apple kernel extensions:

kextstat | grep -v com.apple