Kernel extension question

Question

+Before you decide to answer please read this.... I'm doing this for fun and to learn, please save all "Apple urges against kernel extensions...don't do it!!!" for another one of my silly posts+
Ok so after reading and playing around with apples "HelloKEXT" tutorial I became curious to see if you could launch an executable from a kernel extension. I tried system(), popen() and execl() but always get the warning "Implicit declaration of function "<insert one of the above functions>" so my question is is it possible to launch and executable from a kernel extension if so, how...google was not friendly in this situation
+also please save any "Why would you want to do that when you can use launchd?"+

Answer 1

Eric Lundquist wrote:
etre, if it's not possible to launch an actual executable is possible to carry things out within the extension it self that did relatively the same thing as an executable e.g printf `cd /; ls -l` >> /pathtodesktop
or something like that
Again, yes and no. You can print things out and they will be logged as kernel messages. You have to remember that the kernel is the OS, so when writing a kernel extension, you don't really have an OS.
Almost all kernel extensions are hooks into the kernel for some application to use. You want to try very hard to avoid doing any work in the kernel. The only reason to work in the kernel is to get access to data that you can't get elsewhere. Once you get the data, you use one of a number of low-level communication paths to get it to an application where you can work on it at leisure.