Hi ColdnFrosty,

Please check this forum post for more information:

https://www.silabs.com/community/interface/forum.topic.html/vcp_driver_for_macosbigsur110x-SWJK 

Regards,

Nam Dang

Thanks Nam. Hopefully soon as WeatherCat users cannot interface to their personal weather station hardware without an updated driver to support Big Sur.

Do you have a beta of the CP210X VCP driver that I can run on Big Sur in the meantime? Thanks.

Big Sur (10.16) was out there over 6 months ago.  You knew this was coming.  You knew the changes that were involved, and you had the ability to test it ahead of the OS update.

What kind of company can screw up updating their drivers until *AFTER* the last minute?

I got CP210x to install on Big Sur using the same workaround I had to do for Catalina, which was the same one needed for Mojave:

https://www.silabs.com/community/interface/forum.topic.html/cp210x_osx_catalina10156workaround-pJVF

Here is the bad news - currently for me I can only get this to work on a clean install of Big Sur, where the install hasn't failed once and you've got the "System Extension Blocked" message. Once it's blocked, it must be on a list somewhere and won't load even if you manually add Silicon Labs to the permitted developers. I am fairly sure that with some googling of where the list of blocked extensions is kept you could manually delete that but installing the blocked extension isn't enough.

System extension "Allow" button comes up in Security Preferences again once the developer code has been added in Terminal:

CP210x visible in terminal after install & restart:

Method described in post as a workaround works perfect in Big Sur.

For those who have already installed Big Sur and EXTENSION BLOQUED:

I  deleted previous blocked extensions in my system. It is a delicate process so be careful if you try it. I'm not responsible of any damage in your data, so do this if you really know you are doing.

First of all reboot in recovery mode an disable SIP, once done reboot:

csrutil disable

When you are logged open a Terminal sesión and type this commands:

sudo su

sqlite3 /var/db/SystemPolicyConfiguration/KextPolicy
delete FROM kext_load_history_v3 WHERE team_id='52444FG85C';
delete FROM kext_policy WHERE team_id='52444FG85C';
.quit

 Install the driver and popup will come and Allow button should work

Reboot in recovery mode an enable SIP:

csrutil enable

That's all and working!

Nice work around! That got me back up and running with 5.3.5. Thanks.

Thank you for posting this workaround, Alfonso! It brought back the "Allow" button and asked me to reboot to complete the installation (Big Sur on a 2016 Macbook Pro). However, when logging back in the extension does not load.

When trying to load the extension manually with

sudo kextload /Library/Extensions/SiLabsUSBDriver.kext

I get the usual error message:

Extension with identifiers com.silabs.driver.CP210xVCPDriver not approved to load. Please approve using System Preferences.

Checking the kext_policy table shows the boolean allowed is correctly set to 1, but the flag is set to 20. Does anyone know what this means or how to get over this issue to allow the driver to load?

52444FG85C|com.silabs.driver.CP210xVCPDriver|1|Silicon Laboratories Inc|20

Hi Chris.

I recommend you check if in About this Mac -> System Report -> Software -> Disabled Software there is any entry (Sorry for references, I'm using Spanish version).

Also uninstall any driver installed before, reboot and try to install again v. 5.3.5 from the installer or pkg file inside another folder in dmg with the privacy preferences window open to see when Allow button appears.

With this command you can get some debug info about what is happening:

sudo kextutil /Library/Extensions/SiLabsUSBDriver.kext

 

Kernel extensions are no longer supported in Big Sur at all--developers need to move to the Apple System Extension framework. But this isn't news; Catalina started warning users that kernel extensions were going away all the way back in 2019 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210999. Ian's comment above is right on the money: how can it take until after the release of an OS to realize this problem?

Dear all,

Thank you for your feedback. We almost finished updated our VCP driver to support Big Sur (before its RC release). However, there is dependency on Apple (for months) about signature of the driver. That why we still cannot public the driver for now. We are trying to solve this by contacting/pushing Apple a lot and will public the driver as soon as possible.

Regards,
Nam Dang

Hi ColdnFrosty,

Unfortunately, we are not releasing any beta version for now. Please use workaround suggested by others for temporary.

Hey Nam Dang. Please allow me to chime in an voice my opinion that being late with a vital driver release after warnings since more than a year by Apple is quite an unacceptable failure. You are letting a lot of your customers down by this. Now pointing to Apple to be a dependency for months (after warnings for more than a year) is a bold move. 

Please get this driver ready soon! 

Hi Wolfgang Lienbacher,

Thank you for your feedback. I agreed with you that this is very inconvenience and frustrating for you and others as users who are blocking on our driver release for this macOS Big Sur. I forwarded your feedback to our development team for more pressure and same as you, I also expect that we can publish our driver soon.

Dear all, 

We would like to update that our VCP driver which support macOS Big Sur is already published. You can find and download it from our website or from this link: https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/software/Mac_OSX_VCP_Driver.zip

Regards,