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OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

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Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#161
post #118

It's too bad Apple is blocking Nvidia from releasing graphics card drivers for the more recent OSX versions.

I have been a hackintosh user for the last 3-4 years. I was shocked when I had problems with the GTX1060 I bought. I am using High Sierra because of this. IIRC AMD hardware was the one without support for a long time. It is weird how it changed all of a sudden.

I gave up waiting and switched to an AMD card for the native macOS support. No regrets.

Everything works flawlessly out of the box and I no longer have to wait for Nvidia drivers before installing updates.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have any resources to look at for setting this up?

I don't! For whatever reason, there is precious little information on the internet for running macOS in ESXI. I got the original idea from another Hacker News comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17766016 And then, this is what you need to enable macOS on non-Apple hardware: https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/964-macos-unloc... The rest is the same as setting up any other VM in ESXI with GPU passth…

well that's a start at least! thanks!

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#164

I use OpenCore but have switched my Hackintosh system over to running in a VM (using GPU passthrough). It's easier for me to backup / make changes this way, and there is only a minor performance hit. This is a Geekbench run from my VM (Core i9 10940x with 4 cores passed through): https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15395105 I have a Windows 10 VM running on a same system too. It may not be suitable if you require vi…

If you're looking to create a macOS VM (w/ GPU Passthrough), I've made a detailed guide here: https://github.com/yoonsikp/macOS-KVM-PCI-Passthrough I believe my guide is better at avoiding GPU driver initialization problems than others. I'll need to update it to support OpenCore however.

@stefanwlb

I'm not sure if you know but you have been shadow banned.

> Does nvidia work through GPU pass through as I know hackintosh didn’t support my 1660gti gpu when I tried it a few months ago.

It most likely does not.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The VM guest operating system's GPU drivers are not aware of the fact that they're running in a VM, and have full transparent access to all the hardware resources of the GPU that's assigned to that VM.

I have another question about this. Can I also use the GPU that is passed-through to the guest from the host, once the guest is shut down? For example, say I build a linux host with IGP + powerful discrete GPU. Can I use KVM to pass the discrete GPU to Windows if I want to play a game (using the IGP for the linux desktop) but also use the discreet GPU for Linux CUDA programming after the Windows guest is shut down?

I think that generally works these days. When GPU passthrough first became possible, there were widespread issues with GPUs that could not be easily reset and reinitialized after VM shutdown, and GPU drivers don't like taking control of hardware that's been left in an indeterminate state.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#166
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My OpenCore-based Hackintosh has been rock solid with the sole exceptions of Sidecar (iPad as an additional monitor) Apple Watch Unlock, which sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t. I currently do not care enough to put much effort into it. Everything else works perfectly: iMessages, AirDrop, iCloud, etc. This is not to discredit the parent comment, but rather to stress the importance of choosing your parts for maximu…

What resource(s) would you recommend for identifying compatible parts?

Right now, I'd say become familiar with the /r/hackintosh subreddit and it's accompanying Discord. You can suss together a "golden" build there.

I specifically recommending avoiding anything on tonymacx86 across the board. One, their methods involve a lot of ill-advised hacks and two, their hardware builds often lag and are specced with the aforementioned hacks in mind.

The tl;dr version of parts selection:

- Get a non-oddball Intel CPU, such as a 9700K or whatever,

- An AMD GPU (an TX 580 or 5700XT),

- A Z370 or Z390 motherboard from a reputable manufacturer, such as ASUS or Gigabyte.

- A fast NVMe SSD, because that's what macOS expects these days.

- For AirDrop and certain other macOS features, you'll need a well-supported BT/wifi card.

When I built my system, I specced an 8700K, an ASUS Z390-I Gaming, a Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+, and a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD. I had to swap out the mini-m.2 intel-based wifi card from the motherboard and installed a Dell DW1560 and that was a little annoying, ut it's a one-and-done thing. And dang has my system worked great.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't any inherent problems with Docker, VMWare, Unity games, or Adobe apps on Intel Hackintosh machines, if that's what you mean. Apps just work, and when you do encounter a bug in some app, you can be quite confident it isn't because you're using Hackintosh. I expect AMD is always going to have some oddities because no AMD CPU has ever been used in a real Mac.

How is it even possible to make AMD hackintoshes? It seems a bit like magic to me because I'd expect that while the basic instruction set may be the same, there must be so many intel-specific extensions and differences in the details. Apparently I'm wrong about that, which is cool! ... But then again AMD laptops are almost impossible to hackintosh because of the integrated GPU not being supported, apparently.

Similar differences exist between Intel generations too. They write code to handle missing features because of that. It may not take advantage of AMD-specific features though.

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another question about this. Can I also use the GPU that is passed-through to the guest from the host, once the guest is shut down? For example, say I build a linux host with IGP + powerful discrete GPU. Can I use KVM to pass the discrete GPU to Windows if I want to play a game (using the IGP for the linux desktop) but also use the discreet GPU for Linux CUDA programming after the Windows guest is shut down?

I think that generally works these days. When GPU passthrough first became possible, there were widespread issues with GPUs that could not be easily reset and reinitialized after VM shutdown, and GPU drivers don't like taking control of hardware that's been left in an indeterminate state.

I did some searching and it seems that there is indeed a way to bind/unbind the GPU from the host by writing to /proc/bus/cpu, but apparently this is (was?) not always very stable as some GPU firmwares (AMD in particular it seems) do (did?) not allow resetting the device through any firmware interfaces.

If anyone knows if this is still the case and if the same holds for modern NVidia cards as well that would be great! Is GPU reset a documented/officially supported feature on NVidia/AMD these days?

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#169
post #99

I wonder if OpenCore would enable me to (a) passthrough an i915 GPU but not an AMD GPU; (b) run Catalina on a Mac that doesn't support it? I have an ancient macbookpro 8,2 with the defect that eventually leads to AMD GPU failure (it failed, was replaced under warranty extension, failed again same number of years later). I use GRUB iowr.mod and outb commands to disable the AMD GPU on boot so it's not even seen by Linu…

I’ve had the same problem with 3 different 2011 MacBook Pros

There’s an nvram variable you can change to disable the discrete gpu, details here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/166876/macbook-pro...

I didn’t go the Linux-live cd route so I have to reapply the fix when nvram is reset but other than that the machines work fine now :)

Re: OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

#170
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it even possible to make AMD hackintoshes? It seems a bit like magic to me because I'd expect that while the basic instruction set may be the same, there must be so many intel-specific extensions and differences in the details. Apparently I'm wrong about that, which is cool! ... But then again AMD laptops are almost impossible to hackintosh because of the integrated GPU not being supported, apparently.

Similar differences exist between Intel generations too. They write code to handle missing features because of that. It may not take advantage of AMD-specific features though.

Notably, Hackintosh also doesn’t work between Intel generations. I wanted to downgrade to 10.9, but my Skylake machine couldn’t run anything below 10.11. I had to build a new machine around a Haswell cpu and motherboard.

Now, the Skylake machine was able to run 10.9 in VM. (And much older than 10.9—-I got Tiger to boot in VMWare, although it liked to randomly kernel panic. I don’t quite understand why VM’s are different in this regard.

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