I am working my way through the book Learning Unix for OSX Mountain Lion (I don't have access to the updated version for OSX), in which it demonstrates that using$ ls -l /mach_kernelshould produce a response similar to-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 8190504 Apr 8 22:23 /mach_kernelIn OSX Yosemite I understand that /mach_kernel has been replaced/moved to System/Library/Kernels/kernel. The file permissions for which, appear to be-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  10633544 28 May 19:39 kernelI understand that the @ symbol after the permissions signified that extended permissions were accessible through xattr -l, would this command have shown that in fact the /mach_kernel also had execute permissions?My question is, assuming the execute permissions were not set by someone maliciously, what is the reason for the addition of execute permissions for the kernel?
File permissions for kernel have changed in OSX Yosmite, why?
permissions;kernel