I was recently looking through the system profiler and noticed on the left side under the Contents of Software, there is an Extensions section. When I cycled through the many kexts installed within the /System/Library/Extensions/ folder (and sometimes within other kexts themselves) found here, the load address of some is 0x0. I wanted to ask the general (and maybe stupid) question... do I need those? I mean, if they are unloaded are they used at all...? unless they are depended upon by some other file, should I be able to get rid of a kext displayed below if it has a load address of 0x0?

I am hoping to shed a little light on being able to get rid of unnecessary kernel extensions found in the Extensions folder so that a system isn't bottled up with finding an extension for a piece of hardware that doesn't exist in my system. I hope to be able to follow up with a little more in-depth look at what each kernel extension does for my system so I am not blinding deleting or adding new extensions.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks.

EDIT: I did finish looking through all of the extensions listed in the System Profiler and it seems as if maybe half of the kernel extensions placed inside of my /System/Library/Extensions/ folder (or within other kexts as I've stated above) are being utilized or recognized by the System Profiler.

I also noticed the load address of System.kext was 0x0 so I know my initial thought to deleting all of those with that address to now be false.

Comments and constructive criticism welcome.

Attached Images

Picture 1.jpg (18.8 KB, 15 views)

---