KEXTs and Big Sur

Recently I’ve been trying to get a KEXT to load in Big Sur on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs without requiring an admin user to approve loading the KEXT and avoiding Apple Silicon’s “reboot into recovery to allow KEXT loading” bit.

This post will cover the MDM profile I’m deploying along with some commands that I used to help with testing KEXT deployment and approval on Big Sur.

Nuke and Paving M1 Macs

Those of us getting the new M1 Macs quickly found out that the traditional way of wiping a Mac using Disk Utility no longer works as expected. When using this method we’ve found numerous bugs and it typically leads us to needing to DFU the M1 Mac and use Apple Configurator 2 to completely wipe and restore it.

Here is the best way that I’ve found to completely wipe and reload an M1 Mac.