MacOS – What would happen if I force installed a Linux driver into Mac OS X

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So, recently I got a Mac system and I was planning to put in an Intel WiFi card (as an upgrade for its current card). Now, as we know, Apple and Intel do not get along WiFi-wise.

However, this same card works in Linux.

What would happen if I were to force the Intel drivers for the Linux kernel into Mac OS X? Would it work? Would there be severe instability or data loss? Is it even possible?

Best Answer

What would happen if I were to force the Intel drivers for the Linux kernel into Mac OS X? Would it work? Would there be severe instability or data loss? Is it even possible?

At best? 100% nothing. At worst? Crash your whole system and make it unusable or even unbootable.

While Mac OS X and Linux are both different “flavors” of Unix, you can’t just grab parts from one OS and just install it into the other OS and expect them to work.

That said, if there is source code for the driver somewhere, you could potentially compile them for Mac OS X using the Xcode suite of development tools.

But that is one big if. The reality is compiling Linux application source code on a Mac OS X system from a Linux system is a crapshoot. Sometimes it works and you get to use nice Linux tools on a Mac OS X system. But sometimes it just won’t work. And that is at the application level. On the driver level it’s even less plausible or doable; and even if it was doable it would be difficult to do that at best.

That said, there seems to have been an open source effort to compile Linux Intel drivers for Mac OS X as seen here. But note that the versions of Mac OS X referred to are Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5; nothing more modern.

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