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Troubleshooting
Community-maintained — please add symptoms and workarounds you find.
For the canonical install procedure, always read Installing at the tag you downloaded. This page collects symptoms, not install steps.
Missing entitlement com.apple.developer.system-extension.install
The release was not signed with entitlements embedded. This is a packaging bug in the
build — open an issue. Do not work
around it with boot-args.
The extension never appears in systemextensionsctl list
Both conditions are required, in order: SIP disabled (csrutil status), then
systemextensionsctl developer on. Running developer mode before disabling SIP does not
take effect.
macOS refuses to open the app
The quarantine flag survives download. xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ASFW.app.
Installed, but nothing happens when I plug in an interface Confirm the host adapter enumerates at all — a Thunderbolt-to-FireWire adapter that macOS does not see is a hardware/cabling issue before it is a driver issue.
Using a PCIe FireWire card, and the driver is completely silent
Expected. ASFireWire matches only the Agere FW643 in the Apple Thunderbolt-to-FireWire
adapter (IOPCIMatch = 0x590111c1), so IOKit never starts the driver for other cards —
you get no logs at all, not even failures. Your card's PCI ID has to be added first:
Adding a PCIe FireWire card.
The app verifies against the I/O Registry after macOS reports success, so it can tell you that an install didn't really work rather than silently appearing to succeed. These are the messages it can show.
"Cannot replace ASFW build N with build N: the replacement is not newer." This message appears only when Require a newer build is enabled in Overview → Driver Management. With the guard off (the default), the app does not reject the replacement based on its version. macOS may still decide that an identical bundle is not a replacement, but the app will no longer block the request itself.
If you enable the guard and build locally, ./build.sh --no-bump deliberately keeps the
build number unchanged. Build without --no-bump to increment it, or turn the guard off
for local development. If a downloaded release is rejected with the guard enabled,
please open an issue with both build
numbers.
"ASFW was enabled, but ASFWDriver did not attach to the FireWire PCI controller." The extension loaded, but never bound to a controller. Usually the adapter is absent or asleep — reconnect it and retry. If you are using a PCIe FireWire card, this is expected and not a fault: the card's PCI ID has to be added first, see Adding a PCIe FireWire card.
"ASFW has an orphaned DriverKit server with no attached services." A previous driver process is still registered but owns nothing — usually a teardown that did not complete. Quit ASFW and reboot before installing the newer build.
"ASFW deactivation completed, but the driver or DriverKit server did not terminate."
macOS accepted the uninstall but something is still resident. Reboot before reinstalling,
and confirm with systemextensionsctl list that no ASFW entry remains.
"A driver activation/deactivation request is already in progress." Two install operations overlapped. Wait for the first to finish; the system-extension request is asynchronous and can take a few seconds while awaiting approval.
Caution
Trouble booting after re-enabling SIP. With SIP on, AMFI refuses to launch the ad-hoc-signed dext. This is expected to be a silent no-load, but SIP-on behaviour has not been verified on hardware — so if the machine will not boot cleanly after you re-enabled SIP with the extension still installed, recover as follows.
Recovery:
- Boot into Recovery (hold the power button → Options → Terminal)
csrutil disable- Boot normally
systemextensionsctl uninstall - net.mrmidi.ASFW.ASFWDrivercsrutil enable
Always uninstall the extension before re-enabling SIP.
Include the release tag, the hardware, and the exact symptom. If you found a workaround, say whether it fixes the problem or only hides it.