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EWProxyFramebuffer

by Enno Welbers, written on 19.06.2010 Permalink

Behind this cryptic name hides an open source project hosted at github: http://github.com/mkernel/EWProxyFramebuffer

It is a Mac OS Snow Leopard Kernel Extension which emulates a graphic card (read: virtual screen). The source is documented and consists of the following components:

  • A library for communication (fetch image, mouse position, etc.)
  • A test application
  • The Kext containing:
    • an IOFramebuffer subclass
    • an IOService class which allows secondary access
    • an IOUserClient class which handles the communication with the library

Applications can't directly access the frame buffer as it is already in use by the system. Therefore a "normal" service loads the frame buffer and acts as a communication proxy.

The code is licensed under BSD but it contains a header from Apple which is licensed under Apple License.