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When I rebooted my MBP (Catalina), I got this error message

enter image description here

When I jumped into the System Preferences, this is what I see

enter image description here

It does not give me a lot of information where the extension comes from.

How can I identify which extension it is? If I can identify it, then I will know if I still need it or not.

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2
  • Issue the command sudo spctl --list and see if you can see which Google App got denied.
    – Allan
    Commented Jul 5, 2020 at 15:06
  • apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328141/… Please check this post too. It's old, for high Sierra, but some answers are more generic than that.
    – anki
    Commented Jul 5, 2020 at 17:33

3 Answers 3

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+50

Here is an easy way to identify which kernel extension is causing this MacOS blocking of its install.

When you are on the Security & Privacy System Preferences… telling you:

System software from developer "Google, Inc." was blocked
from loading.

just select Allow once just to be able to get its real name and not to keep it installed.

Then let the complete boot of MacOS terminate, and open a Terminal or xterm.

Enter the following command to extract from all your kernel extensions the one which developer might be Google with:

/usr/bin/sudo kextstat | egrep -i '(^Index|google)'

The 6th field of output of this command is the bundle name under which this extension is registered in the MacOS kernel. Let's say for this example its name is:

com.google.kext.foo

Next go to:

cd /Library/Extensions

and search for this bundle name within all the Google looking directories:

grep 'com.google.kext.foo' [gG]oogle*/Contents/Info.plist

Then if Google made its job of developer correctly you should be able to find on the web what this extension id doing.

And you will know if you need it or not.

If you want to keep it within your /Library/Extensions but not loaded within MacOS, just reboot.

Investigation closed.

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2
  • 1
    In my case it is a com.google.santa-driver. Thx for your answer.
    – Anthony Kong
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 14:38
  • Coming from: github.com/google/santa . Thank you for your return which might be helpful to others.
    – athena
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 16:01
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Having spent some time with Google, the only reference I see to a kernel extension is Google File Stream.

This would make sense, as Dropbox also wants to install a kernel extension for what it does. I believe Dropbox’s “Smart Sync” feature requires it, and I believe Google has a similar feature for what used to be called “Google Drive”.

However, if you do not use Smart Sync with Dropbox, you don’t need the kernel extension.

Unfortunately I don’t know enough about Google File Stream to know what features might rely on the kernel extension, but perhaps this will give you a start in looking for more information.

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0

If you don't want to click allow, you can grep the following 3 locations to see if you can locate the kext to move or delete with sudo.

/Library/Extensions
/Library/SystemExtensions
/System/Library/Extensions

Just cd into these locations are run the grep command like this:

grep -ri "DeveloperName" ./**/*.plist

where "DeveloperName" is the developer name given in the pop up.

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