OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/blob/master/README.md

by tambourine_man • 6 years ago

494 165 6 years ago

github.com

microtonal2• 6 years ago

This seems to be a more generally useful link?

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/

It has links to other parts of the guide in the sidebar.

ghostpepper3• 6 years ago

Introducing something as an unconventional first-in-class piece of software is not very descriptive IMHO.

I think this would be better described by the problem it solves, which I am guessing has to do with MacOS refusing to boot on non-Apple UEFI code, which I presume the Hackintosh community has not been able to obtain?

Saying it's better than Clover also doesn't help anyone who isn't already familiar with the problem.

zadokshi• 6 years ago

Yep, the intro is super weird.

oneplane2• 6 years ago

I wonder if the VT-d disablement is required for the rootkit to work. Ideally you'd have VT-d in macOS for virtual machines, but then again you also don't have Thunderbolt so maybe it's simply not complete enough to enable 'everything'. (and if you really need everything you should probably just buy a Mac anyway)

ganoushoreilly• 6 years ago

You actually can have thunderbolt, as long as it’s on the board. There are plenty of intel boards with it and even a couple amd boards now. I expect with the next generation being royalty free it will be much more prevalent.

oneplane2• 6 years ago

But if you disable Thunderbolt in the UEFI interface macOS can't re-enable it, can it?

roblabla• 6 years ago

I think the story is something like macos fails to parse the DMAR table properly, or something along those lines. If you drop the DMAR ACPI table you don't need to disable VT-d. If you disable Intel Virtualization support from the kernel via the dart=0 kernel flag, you don't need to disable VT-d.

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

If you disable Intel Virtualization support from the kernel via the dart=0 kernel flag

So that is what dart=0 does!

I have Googled this, many times, as with several other weird kernel flags. Not even because I want to fix something, but because I'm curious about what's happening!

Every time, without fail, all I ever find are random forum threads of people saying "this flag fixed my computer", or maybe "You need to enable this flag because it makes your PC act more like a Mac" or some such. It's so frustrating!

drewg123• 6 years ago

Its hilarious that they kept that name. As I recall, "DART" was the IOMMU on G5 (Device Address Remapping Table maybe?)

moondev• 6 years ago

After putting together various hackintoshes through the years I have to agree. The Mac mini is actually a really versatile machine and most compatable option for triple booting macOS, Windows, and Linux with zero hacks and native performance. I use the refind bootloader and it works great with zero compromises like disabling virtualization or janky drivers.

antimatter15• 6 years ago

I was a little bit confused what Clover was referring to— "Clover EFI is a boot loader developed to boot OS X (Hackintoshes), Windows and Linux in legacy or UEFI mode." (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clover)

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

I just used this to build a Hackintosh earlier this week. Took a while to go through the docs and figure out which files and config settings I needed, but install was smooth and I haven't had any problems.

_vbdg• 6 years ago

I just built a new hackintosh with opencore, and compared to clover, it was so much nicer. The documentation [0] is excellent; I'm able to grok what each option does rather than just guessing. It also feels so much less janky than clover did. Better filevault support, faster, leave SIP on, etc. It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E, which will also allow users to keep running kexts even after Apple deprecates third-party ones.

[0] https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/blob/master/Docs/...

Moto7451• 6 years ago

Ditto. I built one last week. Everything was straightforward and the documentation great.

My only criticism of the state of building a Hackintosh is the amount of cargo cult advise out there. Figuring out my Audio took longer than it should as finding the layout-id for my ALC892 was buried in threads where everyone kept parroting “use ID 1, 2, and 3 or just keep trying numbers until it works.” My board needed layout-id 7 and it took a while to find out that I could use IORegistryExplorer to search for “HDAS” (my ACPI device name) and read the value from the table listed.

lukevp2• 6 years ago

I agree, that's always the biggest problem is how much time you have to spend researching what tweaks you have to make for a specific piece of hardware. It seems like there's not that much effort in making the process automatic and more in making the process flexible. I'd rather it either work without any configuration on my end, or fail in predictable ways so I could contribute fixes. For example, for each specific iteration of hardware, there'd be a github issue and everyone with that hardware could swarm it and build an automated fix. There's too much one-off patching that goes on in the hackintosh process these days.

Having said that, I do really appreciate all the work and I think it's great that hackintoshes exist. I just feel like a lot of good research and work is thrown away because it's hidden away within forum threads instead of inlined into the solution.

I was planning on building a hackintosh today (my mac mini just isn't fast enough these days). I'll give Open Core a try. It's been a couple of years since I last built one.

mmm_grayons• 6 years ago

My only criticism of the state of building a Hackintosh is the amount of cargo cult advise out there.

Absolutely right. I think the issue behind this is that many people are repeating advice without understanding why it matters because it worked for them. So, you end up with people cargo-culting SSDT overlays, boot arguments, and other miscellaneous settings. This is somewhat inevitable with something technical, but it's exacerbated by a couple things:

1. many people in the Hackintosh community are very gatekeep-y. While others are very nice, I remember a few years ago being told to "go read the entire ACPI standard and the come back!" Reading about stuff is important, but it's pretty hard to figure out what the correct stuff is to read.

2. A lack of a centralized documentation repository (this is being fixed by OpenCore and others) to explain when different pieces of advice apply or don't. This is especially important on laptops where there may be some obscure quirk of one's particular hardware revision that is much easier found if everyone puts documentation in the same place.

I mostly gave up on hackintosh a few years ago because of all this, but have found it so much better and nicer as of late. Big thanks to the acidanthera guys who seem to be driving a lot of this change.

interactivecode• 6 years ago

I think there hsould be a place where people could list their hardware and their settings/kexts for successfull builds.

And you could just input your hardware and get a list of settings and kexts for your build.

Or like dynamic documentation like the stripe docs, but then for your hackingtosh...

Hoping to setup one myself this week

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

It's also better in that one can avoid polluting /L/E /S/L/E

I haven't used OpenCore[1], but just to be clear, Clover can do this too!

When Clover first came onto the scene (replacing the even older Chameleon/Chimera), bootloader kext injection was my favorite feature. It's great to have Hackintosh kexts separate, particularly in a place where updates can't touch them.

---

[1] Partly because Clover works and I'm used to it, and party because I want to run Mavericks, and I'm not clear how compatible OpenCore is with old OS's.

wellthisisgreat• 6 years ago

Hi, I looked at the guide - it seems there are no step by step instructions there.

Do you think this a good guide given that you just walked through the experience?

I am looking for a solid step-by-step guide that explains what USB to make etc

https://khronokernel-2.gitbook.io/opencore-vanilla-desktop-g...

Or this one:

https://insanelymacdiscord.github.io/Getting-Started-With-Op...

MegaDeKay2• 6 years ago

The link from this article should probably be this one instead.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/

This is the actual website with links, sidebars, etc and will give you the step by step instructions your are looking for. Just be very careful to read every word carefully. It is very easy to breeze past a very important point.

t0mislav• 6 years ago

What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?

zamalek2• 6 years ago

Linus Tech Tips does one every few years, the last one was pretty recent I think. As far as I remember, almost everything worked really well. Notably, Facetime was really hit-and-miss.

austinheap6• 6 years ago

Do you recall the issue? Was it FaceTime specifically or all-things-iCloud? The latter is one of the most common last-mile issues since you need to present Apple servers with hardware identifiers that iCloud agrees are real (i.e.: from your old MacBook gathering dust).

lukevp2• 6 years ago

I think this is a difficult question to answer because MacOS is built for specific hardware configurations, and Hackintosh has to build unofficial support for all sorts of non-standard configurations. Your experience with a hackintosh really depends what hardware you're trying to install it on.

austinheap6• 6 years ago

There are people who publish hardware ‘QVL’ lists for Hackintosh builds — stick to the list and it’s smooth sailing. Venture off the list and you end up on page 16 of some forum convinced you need to dump your DSDT tables to edit some voodoo magic.

I’ve been on developing on Hackintoshs for work full-time (both desktop and laptops) for many many years now with minimal hiccups. 4K HDR touchscreen laptop in 2018, yes please!

stevievee3• 6 years ago

They are more stable than ever right now - probably because the development community has grown in numbers.

I've been using a hackintosh as my main productivity desktop since about 2014. Details on my latest build here: http://stephenvescio.com/blog/building-a-2019-mac-pro-hackin...

DenseComet3• 6 years ago

Nice article, however, you may want to think about changing the color scheme of your website, the gray text on a gray background makes it a bit hard to read.

acomjean• 6 years ago

This really sinks the value proposition or a mac tower. You are getting comparable performance for 1/4 the price... I had the old mac pro, and I did love the quality of the build and ease of drive installation.. But still.

"Single-core score: 1,121 Multi-core score: 11,769 The scores for my Hackintosh with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz are:

Single-core score: 1,259 Multi-core score: 10,515"

I switched to linux for the most part at this point (My work machine is still a 2015 MacBook though..) I had a hacintosh tower 8 year ago but I was always nervous about upgrading it.

snazz• 6 years ago

It works very well. I have a Clover Hackintosh (not OpenCore) on my [edit: cheap pre-built generic] desktop (i5-7400, iGPU, macOS has its own SSD). It works great, even allowing me to upgrade from Mojave to Catalina and forget that it's not a real Mac. My monitor always looked pink, but if I change my monitor's input color format to YPbPr it works fine. The patch that I used to fix that in Mojave is broken in Catalina, but I don't really care.

Aside from that, it works just like a real Mac in basically every way.

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

I set up my first Hackintosh in 2011 while on Spring Break in High School.

It was the most difficult computing project I'd ever done up until that point--partly because it was legitimately more difficult back then, partly because I was using a pre-built Dell instead of a custom machine with parts targeting Hackintosh, and also probably because I was a stupid teenager who didn't know what he was doing.

But once I was done, it was absolutely stable. Everything worked[1]. I installed every point release update[2] through the normal software updater without problems. This was actually my first experience with OS X, and I completely fell in love with the platform.

Many people who haven't used Hackintosh seem to assume it's an unstable mess, and it certainly can be a mess if you don't set it up correctly, or attempt to use not-quite-compatible hardware. But my experience has been that if and when you set it up properly, Hackintosh can be every bit as stable as a real Mac.

---

[1] Except for sleep. Getting sleep working on Hackintosh is very doable but usually annoying, and it's not needed on desktops.

[2] Ie 10.6.5 ==> 10.6.8. Upgrading Snow Leopard ==> Lion almost certainly would have failed had I tried it, although such upgrades are sometimes possible nowadays with Clover, and I assume OpenCore.

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

Thank you for this comment. I was looking for anything here that might be relevant to me, and it looks like we both had hackintosh builds at the same time / version of OS X. In fact, it was the Snow Leopard->Lion upgrade which turned me off from the whole scene. Great to know things have evolved beyond that in a positive way.

throwlaplace6• 6 years ago

on desktops.

how about on laptops? not sleep itself but hackintoshing a laptop? i really want workspaces on whatever laptop i use but i don't want to pay through the nose for a macbook - i have a loner 2013 mbp right now and even those are still selling for like $800.

mikkelam• 6 years ago

It's good, just make sure to get a GPU vendor that Apple is currently maintaining a good relationship with.

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

I've had my Hackintosh for six years now and it's been fairly stable. It's sometimes done a bit of freezing up after a boot and I'm used to something failing after I've had the system running for a while. Like after 30-60 days of uptime, the audio stack might just stop working and I need to reboot the computer to get audio back. Not really a big deal and I'm really happy with how much computer I got for a thousand euro back in 2014.

kposehn2• 6 years ago

I’ve been using a Hack Pro for several months with OpenCore. It took a bit to learn my way through the docs as they were not terribly clear when I started but once I was up and running it was nice.

I was largely happy with it, as the machine was extremely fast and very, very quiet. I also had FileVault running too along with SIP. However, the main issues I had were stability - these machines are generally nowhere near as stable as a regular Mac as there are many small issues which over time can become big (restarting on wake from sleep, unreliable internet, disconnecting from iCloud, etc).

Depending on your use case, these may not be an issue. However, Opencore was vastly better than Clover and if you want to try this I’d start there first.

tarsinge• 6 years ago

My main workstation was a hackintosh back in 2012 and I remember it was extremely stable for my use. Did not use iCloud nor Wake from sleep though, and it was pre SIP (OS X Lion).

runjake2• 6 years ago

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 maximum Hackintosh compatibility.

I built my PC to be a Hackintosh. I choose the build parts that were most compatible. Trying to Hackintosh arbitrary PC builds is above my tolerance threshold.

If you don’t want to mess with your Hackintosh all the time, go this route. If you don’t want to have to mess with your Hackintosh at all, buy a Mac.

divbzero• 6 years ago

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

Digory• 6 years ago

You mean OpenCore is not as stable? Hackintoshes in general have become really stable, at least on the "recommended" hardware from sites like TonyMacx86.

I've had a Clover Hack Pro as my primary workstation for at least 4 years now -- and it's more stable than my 2018 Macbook Air.

kposehn2• 6 years ago

It's more that any hackintosh isn't perfect, and you'll notice some glaring flaws.

For me, it restarted on wake about 15% of the time. But every time that happened, it was always jarring. In addition, I would occasionally get some crazy graphic glitches which required a force restart (I was using the internal graphics on an i9 chip, so it should have been perfectly stable - but wasn't).

However, iCloud worked perfectly (along with handoff, copy/paste between devices, etc.). But in the back of my mind I knew that I was running a machine that had code not from apple on it, and that would always be a small but real risk.

I bought a Mac mini i7 1tb and dropped 64gb of ram in it. I get practically the same performance for the same price in parts, plus a T2 security chip. The only price I've paid is slightly more noise under load, which happens infrequently.

If I had it to do again, I would have gone with the Mac mini instead, but it was a good learning experience and taught me a lot about the lower levels of the system.

tdiggity4• 6 years ago

As another data point - Building a hackintosh is so much simpler now than it was 5 years ago.

The reddit forum at r/hackintosh is pretty helpful for getting started and has a nice repository of builds.

AMD Ryzen CPUs are fairly well supported now. My current system is a 3700x with radeon 5700xt gpu. I use OSX for my daily work, and Windows 10 for gaming. It's a great setup for $1000. My OSX geekbench specs beat out the latest standard 16" Macbook Pros.

For developers - One thing to note is that Docker is not supported with AMD hackintoshes. There are some workarounds but they seem fragile. Otherwise, everything else works great for me. I am mostly on cloud based apps/tools. Others also pointed out that Adobe, and vmware has issues. virtual box works.

_fzslm• 6 years ago

also Adobe software requires patches, which is a little bit more of a dealbreaker.

iamjustlooking• 6 years ago

Unity wont bake lights on Ryzen Hackintosh too using Progressive GPU/CPU. Also VMWare won't run because of lack of Intel specific VT-x support, same with Docker for mac, Virtualbox runs fine though (it finds amd-v).

unicornfinder• 6 years ago

To be honest quite a few apps don't seem to play nicely without the Intel-specific instructions present. REAPER won't run at all, Cubase crashes unless you remove the surround panner VST, Pro Tools would crash on launch last time I tried it (but this may have been fixed since)...

cgb2232• 6 years ago

How is the stability of Hackintosh?

What about updating to newer OS versions (minor and patch releases)

Is that experience better?

I haven’t looked into it since 2010

tdiggity4• 6 years ago

I did run into some stability issues with the latest 10.15.4 release. But I was not running this latest version of OpenCore (0.5.7) that supposedly works better with 10.15.4. I upgraded before 0.5.7 was released. I have a backup that I can test with before fully committing.

That being said - I had to rebuild my machine to downgrade to 10.15.3. Luckily, I had a spare backup to work off of and things are great again.

Stability and other misc notes for 10.15.3 and below:

* Stable system, no kernel panics

* Sleep does not work (it's a desktop anyway, so not an issue for me).

I don't have USB-C or TB-3 on this system. There are expansion boards for this, but since they aren't common on hackintoshes yet, you're likely going into untested waters. For example, to run the LG 5K display (TB3 only), you need a specific motherboard with a TB3 connector, a usb-c pci-e card, and a lot of frustration to get up and running. I'm sure it's a huge PITA.

Is the experience better?

I mainly did this because I wanted to have an all-in-one machine to play the latest games with on Win10 and do work in OSX. For my daily work and coding (mostly JS/Python these days), I haven't had any issues. For the price, it can't be beat!

therealmarv2• 6 years ago

ah good to know. So at least never an AMD hackintosh for me. Are this problems completely gone with Intel hackintoshes?

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

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.

DelightOne• 6 years ago

This here says Docker with virtualbox is a thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/eatpwu/docker_c...

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

Yep, this is also how you run Docker on OS's which predate the addition of HyperVisor.framework.

mixologic• 6 years ago

This is essentially my exact setup. Anytime I need docker support I run a Linux vm in vagrant/virtual box. Nice having 64gb of ram and nvme2 ssds.

hashmymustache• 6 years ago

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

eralps• 6 years ago

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.

djmobley• 6 years ago

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.

jeroenhd• 6 years ago

Every time I see OpenCore I feel like trying to make a Hackintosh again, but then I remember that my GPU is an Nvidia one and that it will never have drivers on any recent macOS releases.

My laptop is another contender, but that has an Intel wireless card so that will never be supported either. The network card issue can probably be worked around through some virtualisation, but the laptop CPU is too old to do IOMMU properly so doing a KVM Hackintosh is impossible as well.

pottertheotter2• 6 years ago

No Nvidia drivers is very frustrating. I built a Hackintosh in mid 2017 with a GTX 1080 and it was a dream. Accidentally killed my build and didn't have time to figure out how to fix it, so I was using my hardware as an Ubuntu server for a lot of data processing and machine learning. Finally turned it back into a Hackintosh again this week and was so bummed to find out Mojave and Catalina don't have Nvidia drivers.

Granted, it's still way better than the mid-2012 MBA I was using, but I wish I could still use that GPU.

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

Personally, I would just throw High Sierra back on the machine. It's the best of the semi-recent macOS releases anyway.

It's going to go out of support when 10.16 is presumably released this fall, but... I don't know, live a little!

DenseComet3• 6 years ago

You might just be able to pop out your Intel wireless card and install a compatible broadcom card. They don't seem to be too expensive so could be a cool project during this time.

agildehaus2• 6 years ago

For anyone with an nVidia GPU, at least on my desktop I can just use my integrated Intel GPU while leaving my nVidia 2080 in the slot for Windows.

Works like a charm. Just a simple boot flag required with WhateverGreen.

buzzert2• 6 years ago

If anyone has an Intel NUC that they were thinking of turning into a hackintosh, there’s a really great guide/set of documentation out there for a project called HaC Mini[1] which is based on OpenCore. This was my first exposure to OpenCore after being a long time Clover user and it was very good!

[1] https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

dillonmckay• 6 years ago

What issues did you run into, or was everything supported onboard?

buzzert2• 6 years ago

My particular NUC (the NUC8i7HVK) is precisely the one targeted by the HaC Mini project, so everything worked really great out of the box.

That wasn’t the case a few months ago though, when graphics acceleration, sleep, and even USB didn’t work! It was really thanks to the authors of this project who got everything working. They even have technically detailed explanations about how they reverse engineered some of the drivers to get everything working correctly.

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

The latest i9 NUCs look like a great Mac Mini replacement if they're Hackintoshable. Although they seem to be quite pricey.

Rebelgecko2• 6 years ago

The NUCs with CPUs comparable to the one that the Mac Minis offer are a lot cheaper (since they're a few generations old). Around $500 or so if you bring your own memory

chrischen• 6 years ago

Cool this was what I was looking for: basically confirmed system build that works rather than struggling to assemble a bunch of parts and making them work.

sahin-boydas• 6 years ago

This will give so many opportunities to people who can pay their 10x monthly income to a buy 2-year-old mac :))

I think Apple had a stupid idea to become more luxurious and hire Angela Jean Ahrendts for 100M. God bless they realize, if they go for volume and price aggressive (as Steve Jobs said), more people can benefit.

I want hackintosh to work so well that indirectly, it will force Apple to develop way cheaper computers for the whole world.

agildehaus2• 6 years ago

Apple appears to be headed in the direction of making their own processors for their desktops and laptops, so this Hackintosh business isn't going to last much longer.

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

That's assuming that they completely abandon Intel, which would mean that the Mac Pro would not be offered with a 28-core Intel Xeon W, but rather with an ARM processor that has comparable performance (or not offered at all).

But even if Apple shifts to 100% ARM, Hackintosh community still has whatever number of years that Apple still has to support the computers that they are selling now / selling until ARM takes completely over.

x3sphere5• 6 years ago

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 virtualization inside macOS itself though. Nested virtualization doesn't work too well with the Android emulator, in my experience.

terhechte• 6 years ago

As I'm currently thinking about also going this route I do have some questions, if I may. Could you elaborate what your hardware setup is? Do you have two screens, and two powerful GPUs? Or do you use a HDMI Switch for one screen? Basically, how do you cope with the hardware limitations of GPU Passthrough

(I briefly looked into using a single GPU for passthrough, which seems possible but involved rewriting the GPU rom and I'm not going to do that :)

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

You don't need to rewrite the GPU rom! I never set it up fully due to other issues, but I had High Sierra + GPU passthrough working quite well in ESXI last fall.

I would still be using ESXI now, except my (unusual) goal was to run 10.9, and I couldn't for the life of me get GPU passthrough working in 10.9.

The neat thing about ESXI, though, is that it is officially supported by macOS. Only on Apple hardware, of course, but with ESXI the motherboard is all fake anyway, so it works identically regardless of the host's hardware. All you need to do is patch out the Apple hardware check, which is easy.

x3sphere5• 6 years ago

One screen, two GPUs. For the screen I've got an LG 38GL950G, and the GPUs are a Radeon WX5100 (macOS) and RTX 2080 Ti (Windows). I run the Linux host (Ubuntu) headless.

I have the macOS side connected via HDMI and Windows via DisplayPort. Then I switch inputs when through the monitor's OSD for changing the OS (I think there's a way to do this through DDC/CI commands depending on the monitor, in which case you'd be able to write a script to do this, haven't looked into that yet). I have a USB switch for moving all device connections to the OS of my choice.

Also the board I have, an X299 Designare, has several USB controllers on their own IOMMU group so you can pass through each to their own VM.

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

That sounds pretty nice actually. Really the only pain that I feel with my Hackintosh is the updates (which is why I'm still on Mojave). However, I'm not really sure if I want to trade in performance since updates are a periodic pain but a performance hit is gonna always be there.

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

OP didn't specify, but I assume they're using a type-1 hypervisor, likely either KVM or ESXI. If you're also using GPU passthrough, the performance loss is minimal—nothing like your standard Virtualbox VM.

Now, whether its actually easier to set up than a bare-metal Hackintosh, I'm not so sure. I tried it last fall, and it took a lot of fiddling to get working. (It also flat-out didn't work for my very specific use case, but that's another matter.) Maybe it would be better at surviving updates, but it's not obvious to me that it necessarily would, especially when Clover/OpenCore are already pretty decent at it.

tdiggity4• 6 years ago

I wanted to try this but was worried that the gpu pass through wouldn’t be smooth for basic video playback. How well do YouTube and Netflix play? How smooth does it feel overall? Could someone be fooled into thinking it was a native system?

hrrsn• 6 years ago

If you’re passing through an entire GPU, it feels just like a native system

unixhero• 6 years ago

What's your hypervisor os?

x3sphere5• 6 years ago

Ubuntu 19.10, using KVM+QEMU

Ecco• 6 years ago

Nice setup! Quick question: would you recommend getting a Core i9 10940x today or waiting for a 10900K?

rubatuga2• 6 years ago

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.

MegaDeKay2• 6 years ago

Consider taking a look at this Opencore setup specifically configured for KVM and GPU passthrough.

https://github.com/Leoyzen/KVM-Opencore

rubatuga2• 6 years ago

@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.

vbezhenar2• 6 years ago

For Android I would try to run its emulator on a host machine and make it accessible via network (AFAIK adb works with emulator via TCP connection anyway).

paypalcust83• 6 years ago

Interesting, I'll have to look at it. My T480 Clover hackintosh needs a rebuild because battery status broke and it hangs randomly every 15 minutes-3 days. It may have something to do with the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB. I have no idea about DSDT, so I'm going to have to dive in and debug that mess.

dddddaviddddd• 6 years ago

What guide did you follow for your setup?

cmurf• 6 years ago

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 Linux. But when I boot macOS, at some point during the session something enables discrete graphics and I get a kernel panic. I also get a kernel panic when doing any kind of software update (it's now stuck on 10.13.6).

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

I haven't looked into this for Catalina, but for most past releases, there are community tools for installing the OS on unsupported Macs (to whatever level of success is possible on your hardware).

That's going to be a lot easier then OpenCore.

haxiomic• 6 years ago

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 :)

victorhooi• 6 years ago

Has anybody tried getting this to work under Proxmox (specifically) or KVM?

I previously used to use this guide for Proxmox - which uses Clover:

https://www.nicksherlock.com/2019/10/installing-macos-catali...

However, it seems like OC might be easier.

Somebody there suggested this (apparently non-open-source) EFI making script:

https://www.macos86.it/files/file/20-opencore-efi-maker/

but I can't even seem to get that working.

Another poster on this thread suggested

https://github.com/Leoyzen/KVM-Opencore

which seems like it could work - curious if other people have tried it and what their experiences are?

josteink• 6 years ago

I run OSX under KVM with clover.

I’ve used this guide: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

omnimus3• 6 years ago

Two years ago i took my very old 2009 gaming pc bought fastest processor for the socket (LGA1156) on ebay for giggles (20usd) and put hackintosh on it.

Took a weekend to figure out but after that became pretty solid. So solid in fact that it became my main machine. I don't know what am i missing but i cut videos, make screencasts, work in blender... it all seems just fine.

I am doing this professionally not as hobby its my main workstation.

Now i was probably pretty lucky and for soundcard i need to use external one (i would anyway). But i am pretty sure if you buy right components you will get as stable mac as original and you will be done in two hours not days like me.

Wowfunhappy25• 6 years ago

Hackintosh has a tendency to create amusing technical problems, so I thought I'd share some I've come across over the years.

---

I had one computer that would only boot if a specific USB Bluetooth adapter was connected. If it wasn't inserted while the computer turned on, I'd get a kernel panic during the bootup process. However, I could unplug the adapter after boot and everything would be fine.

I didn't notice the problem until several months after I'd set up the Hackintosh, when I tried to replace my current Bluetooth adapter with a more powerful "class 1" dongle.

(I don't remember how I eventually fixed this.)

---

I had another computer which wouldn't boot outside of safe mode. I couldn't remember the flag for turning on extra debug messages, but instead of looking it up like a smart person, I guessed and typed "debug=yes". This did not enable any extra messages, but it did cause the computer to boot correctly.

As far as I can tell, debug=yes is not a valid kernel flag. At least at the time, there was no information about it anywhere on the internet. But this computer would not boot without it. Removing the flag caused it to once again get stuck, and adding it back made everything work again.

---

This one didn't happen to me personally. I was browsing some Hackintosh forum, and I came across a thread titled (paraphrasing):

Help! Audio only works while I'm moving my mouse!

This might be my favorite technology problem ever.

tekknik• 6 years ago

I’ve personally experienced a variation of the mouse one. For me it was network traffic would only pass if I moved the mouse. I have a screen recording of it somewhere, it was pretty wild. I remember switching from a Mac Pro to an iMac resolved it for me.

cutler• 6 years ago

I'm still using a Hackintosh (Gigabyte EX58-UD5) I built in January 2010 as my main desktop. Bought a second-hand graphics card on eBay for £50 and upgraded it to Mojave. Everything works fine except sleep which I don't really miss.

vasac• 6 years ago

At the time I was starting with Hackintosh it was unable to boot every now and then. I couldn't figure out what's going on because months could pass without any issues.

At the end it turned out that boot went right only if my microserver (NAS) was turned on. I guess I had an SMB mount that failed before GUI even started. Couple of weeks after I figured what was going on a new version of macOS was published and I switched - never had similar problem again.

Even now I'm not 100% sure that networking issue was exact cause but it certainly looked that way at the time.

wayneftw• 6 years ago

I have had these same kind of problems with regular Macs.

My 2010 Mac Pro won’t boot without a specific type of DVI cable and display. Certain standard USB peripherals (including some mice) don’t work or cause other problems on my 2015 Macbook Pro while they work just fine on my Linux or Windows machines.

This is not just a problem with Hackintoshes.

dreamer_soul• 6 years ago

I just got a workstation grade Dell machine t7610 to be exact spent more than a week trying to hackentosh it but couldn't for some reason I always got some obscure error and none of the fixes worked. Found someone at GitHub with a similar machine but different graphics card and still couldn't make it work. But that got me thinking maybe there is a place for a tool where you feed it your hardware and it generates the most optimal configuration and image

freakcage• 6 years ago

is it possible to dual boot mac os and Linux/windows or even triple boot?

I search last time no support for rtx gpu card in hackintosh. So I'm thinking to buy second gpu. What is best value gpu that support hackintosh?

My setup right now is amd r5 3600 with rtx 2060 super. I'm currently running dual boot windows 10 & Ubuntu.

aledthemathguy• 6 years ago

Can anyone let me know where do I start if i'd like to try this out?

Caveat: I am using the Pentium G4560 CPU. Is that a deal-breaker?

Thx!

OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

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