macOS Catalina AudioServerPlugIn Installation

Question

CoreAudio/AudioServerPlugIn.h says that .driver plugin packages must be installed in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/ However I don't know of any documentation that tells of how to make CoreAudio notice the appearance of the new driver (or when uninstalling, its absence). Before Catalina [beta 7] most people did something like

sudo killall coreaudiod

and that worked well. However in Catalina, this doesn't work anymore, and the only way I've found to get plugins loaded or unloaded is to reboot the machine, which seems a heavy handed approach for userland plugins.

So is there another way? Or is this a bug?

Answer 1

This works for me with SIP enabled on macOS Catalina 10.15 (19A546d):

sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod

Answer 2

It looks like coreaudiod is catching SIGTERM and not exiting, so using SIGKILL fixes the problem:

sudo killall -9 coreaudiod

From the unix point of view, not eventually exiting on SIGTERM seems like a bug: FB7244673.

UPDATE I eventually got feedback from Apple that said the only supported method was a reboot. I’ve been ignoring that however.