DriverKit entitlement policy clarification for development purposes

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Created 1w

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I am seeking clarification on whether the various driverkit entitlement families (com.apple.developer.driverkit.family.*) are available for development on my local Mac without requesting entitlements from Apple.

My experience is inconsistent with public statements made by Apple, and I am wondering if there have been changes to development entitlements as of 2026. I am hoping there is something obvious that I have missed.

At WWDC2022 Apple stated that "In MacOS... In fact, all DriverKit family entitlements are now available to use for development."

On these very forums, Eskimo himself also suggested this was the case in 2024.

However, my own experience has been that in my provisioning profile on my paid developer account, I am not able to obtain com.apple.developer.driverkit.family.networking for the purpose of developing a driver for unsupported hardware. As you can see, I do not have the networking entitlement:

{
..
  "Entitlements" => {
...
    "com.apple.developer.driverkit" => true
    "com.apple.developer.driverkit.transport.usb" => [
      0 => {
        "idVendor" => "*"
      }
    ]

And there appears to be no mechanism to add these entitlement:

Screenshot 2026-03-10 at 11.15.25 PM.png

Answered by jquirke1 in 879128022

The solution is to create a new profile. You cannot add new entitlements to an existing profile. You may need to unlink the profile from any apps before you can delete it and replace it.

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Answer 1

jquirke1 OP

1w

Accepted Answer

The solution is to create a new profile. You cannot add new entitlements to an existing profile. You may need to unlink the profile from any apps before you can delete it and replace it.

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Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

6d

A few brief clarifications and comments:

I am seeking clarification on whether the various driverkit entitlement families (com.apple.developer.driverkit.family.*) are available for development on my local Mac without requesting entitlements from Apple.

Making the more explicit, they "Development Only" entitlement variants do two things:

They match against a VERY broad hardware configuration, basically letting you match "any" hardware.
Their ONLY available to "Development" signed builds.

Note that the second criteria heavily restricts distribution, as development builds will ONLY run on machines which were registered with your developer account at the point the signing profile was generated. This is largely invisible when using automatic signing (Xcode will just generate a new profile), but can be easy to overlook with manual signing.

At WWDC2022 Apple stated that "In MacOS... In fact, all DriverKit family entitlements are now available to use for development."

On these very forums, Eskimo himself also suggested this was the case in 2024.

Strictly speaking, this wasn't entirely accurate as the PCI development entitlement wasn't actually added until late-2025. However, everything else did/does have a development entitlement.

The solution is to create a new profile. You cannot add new entitlements to an existing profile. You may need to unlink the profile from any apps before you can delete it and replace it.

Your post was a good excuse to expand my existing DriverKit signing guide, which you can find here. In your case, take a look at the section on how to setup automatic signing and how to clear out old profile files.

__
Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

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