All changes had to be made cautiously, since Apple never knew which existing third-party kernel extensions were digging around in which kernel data structures.

And even with all this effort, sometimes third-party kernel extensions broke anyway after major OS updates.

There are a few more niceties in the world of kernel extensions that, surprisingly, are aimed at making them more user (yes, user, not developer) friendly.

He generated a hacked power management kernel extension that disabled these features, which eliminated the high heat and power draw issues while playing audio.

But as Snow Leopard adoption ramps up and 64-bit updates of existing kernel extensions become available, why might you actually want to use the 64-bit kernel?

It runs the AIX/6000 3.2 version of Unix with kernel extensions to support parallel processing.

Incidentally, the Extensions/ directory above contains kernel extensions only.

BootX loads the kernel, spins the pinwheel cursor, and loads any needed kernel extensions (kexts).

In addition to increasing stability, the build was accompanied by a note to developers "strongly encouraging" them to focus on building and testing 64-bit support for kernel extensions.

Both the kernel extension and VMWare Fusion 3 application are 64-bit.