Mac OS X 10.10.4 Replaces discoveryd With mDNSResponder
discoveryd would cause random crashes, duplicate names on the network and many other WiFi-relate bugs. In the latest beta, Apple appears to have applied the same fix as the enthusiasts by axing discoveryd completely.
Looking at Activity Monitor on OS X 10.10.4 seed 4, discoveryd is no longer loaded by the system — instead relying on mDNSResponder. The ‘new’ process is really the one Apple used to use pre-Yosemite and did not have these problems.
The saga of discoveryd is baffling to me. I would love to hear the backstory on how it shipped. And I still haven’t heard a plausible theory on what Apple was hoping to accomplish with it in the first place. What was the point of it?
There are two weeks until WWDC, where Apple will probably introduce OS X 10.11. While that won’t be released to the public until, most likely, autumn, 10.10.4 isn’t publicly available yet either. That means that developers, at least, have been using and complaining about discoveryd for about a year, and it’s still busted for consumers.
Furthermore, I haven’t heard a compelling reason for discoveryd’s existence. It must be “better”, in some way, because I can’t think of another reason why Apple would task their engineers with rewriting the networking stack. I always assumed it was to unify iOS and OS X and to enable Continuity features, but those seem to work just fine under mDNSresponder.
I’ve had my own inexplicable and disturbing network failures which require disabling networking, then re-enabling it—even as the same local LAN has no issue at all on a 2nd machine. Maybe it’s discoveryd, maybe not but I’m hoping. And then there is the Pathological Network Performance in Apple OS X issue, but I don’t expect Apple to fix that one.
Hopefully, this will eventually fix the problem where I have to reboot my Apple TV before using it or it won’t have network access.
Previously: discoveryd Is Still Buggy, Why DNS in OS X 10.10 Is Broken.
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