alt Hacker NewsI've never used a computer that didn't have occasional hiccups. The Mac I have for work has lots of weird bugs. One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
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kavok • today at 11:56 AM
Can any OS gracefully handle switching between WiFi and Ethernet without at least a blip in connectivity?
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> One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
macOS has a 'service (priority) order':
* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...
It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):
* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...
And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.
By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.
Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.