DriverKit matching to an iOS device from macOS

I see the attribute kCDCDoNotMatchThisDevice for my iPhone is YES when looking at the IO registry and my dext does not initialize

This is unrelated to the issue you're having. I don't know that it's every been formally documented, but all that key does is one of out other USB driver from matching. It would not have prevented a DEXT from matching against the USB device itself.

That leads to here:

Are we prohibited from matching to a connected iPhone with DriverKit?

Two answer to that:

1. At a purely technical level, I'm not aware of anything that would prevent a properly DEXT from matching with it.

2. Actually shipping such a DEXT in a product would require a DEXT signing configuration that matched it. That's very unlikely to be granted, given that it would disable all of the systems normal iPhone support.

That leads to here:

I'm working on a project to allow HID input from macOS to a connected iOS device.

I don't understand how you think a DEXT that matches against the iPhone is useful/helpful here. The standard approach apps that do this use is:

1. An app on the phone collect touch events on the iOS device.

2. That app sends the events to another app running on the mac.

3. That app inject the events into the mac event stream.

None of that process really requires/involves a DEXT. What are you actually trying to do here?

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware