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OpenCore: Hackintosh Alternative to Clover

494 points by tambourine_man 7y ago

danieldk 7y ago
This seems to be a more generally useful link? https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ It has links to other parts of the guide in the sidebar.
- ghostpepper 7y 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 7y ago
    Yep, the intro is super weird.
oneplane 7y 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 7y 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.
  - oneplane 7y ago
    But if you disable Thunderbolt in the UEFI interface macOS can't re-enable it, can it?
- roblabla 7y 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.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y ago
    Its hilarious that they kept that name. As I recall, "DART" was the IOMMU on G5 (Device Address Remapping Table maybe?)
- moondev 7y 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 7y 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clover)
pottertheotter 7y 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.
mmm_grayons 7y 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/Configuration.pdf https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/blob/master/Docs/...
- Moto7451 7y 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.
  - lukevp 7y 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.
t0mislav 7y ago
What is current state of Hackintosh this days? Is it stable?
- zamalek 7y 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.
  - austinheap 7y 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).
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Just to add to this: it's not strictly necessary to pull an MLB from a real Mac, although that can certainly be a shortcut. If you present Apple with computer information that makes sense, and you do it right the first time, they'll usually accept it as real. I've done this around five times now and it has always worked. I can actually enter my made-up serial numbers on Apple's website, and they show up in the system as real computers[1]! The serial, MLB, hardware model, etc all need to match, and you need to get it right on the first try! Apple seems to get suspicious once you've fed them weird data. [1] When I tell people this, they always ask if I'm sure I didn't collide with a real serial. The possibility that this happened--especially every time I've done it--is incredibly small, so I'm quite sure that isn't what's happening.
      - ghostpepper 7y ago
        This is fascinating to me. Surely Apple has a databases somewhere of all the S/Ns of all the computers they've ever sold. Why would they accept a made up one and insert it into their database?
kposehn 7y 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 7y 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).
- runjake 7y 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 7y ago
    What resource(s) would you recommend for identifying compatible parts?
    - omnimus 7y ago
tdiggity 7y 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 7y ago
  also Adobe software requires patches, which is a little bit more of a dealbreaker.
  - iamjustlooking 7y 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 7y 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)...
- cgb223 7y 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
  - tdiggity 7y ago
nomanlagharipq 7y ago
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hashmymustache 7y ago
It's too bad Apple is blocking Nvidia from releasing graphics card drivers for the more recent OSX versions.
- eralps 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- pottertheotter 7y 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.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y 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!
- DenseComet 7y 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.
- agildehaus 7y 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.
buzzert 7y 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/ https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  What issues did you run into, or was everything supported onboard?
  - buzzert 7y 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.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  The latest i9 NUCs look like a great Mac Mini replacement if they're Hackintoshable. Although they seem to be quite pricey.
  - Rebelgecko 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- agildehaus 7y 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.
  - Hamuko 7y 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.
x3sphere 7y 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 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 7y 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 :)
  - Wowfunhappy 7y 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.
    - weaksauce 7y ago
      do you have any resources to look at for setting this up?
      - 7y ago
paypalcust83 7y 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 7y ago
  What guide did you follow for your setup?
cmurf 7y 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).
- Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y 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-how-to-disable-discrete-gpu-permanently-from-efi#285896 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 7y 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-catalina-10-15-on-proxmox-6/ 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/ 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 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 7y ago
  I run OSX under KVM with clover. I’ve used this guide: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
omnimus 7y 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.
Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
dreamer_soul 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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!

This seems to be a more generally useful link? https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ It has links to other parts of the guide in the sidebar.

ghostpepper 7y 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 7y ago
  Yep, the intro is super weird.

oneplane 7y 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 7y 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.
- oneplane 7y ago
  But if you disable Thunderbolt in the UEFI interface macOS can't re-enable it, can it?
roblabla 7y 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.
- Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y ago
  Its hilarious that they kept that name. As I recall, "DART" was the IOMMU on G5 (Device Address Remapping Table maybe?)
moondev 7y 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 7y 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Clover)

pottertheotter 7y 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.

mmm_grayons 7y 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/Configuration.pdf https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/blob/master/Docs/...

Moto7451 7y 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.
- lukevp 7y 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.

t0mislav 7y ago

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

zamalek 7y 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.
- austinheap 7y 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).
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Just to add to this: it's not strictly necessary to pull an MLB from a real Mac, although that can certainly be a shortcut. If you present Apple with computer information that makes sense, and you do it right the first time, they'll usually accept it as real. I've done this around five times now and it has always worked. I can actually enter my made-up serial numbers on Apple's website, and they show up in the system as real computers[1]! The serial, MLB, hardware model, etc all need to match, and you need to get it right on the first try! Apple seems to get suspicious once you've fed them weird data. [1] When I tell people this, they always ask if I'm sure I didn't collide with a real serial. The possibility that this happened--especially every time I've done it--is incredibly small, so I'm quite sure that isn't what's happening.
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      This is fascinating to me. Surely Apple has a databases somewhere of all the S/Ns of all the computers they've ever sold. Why would they accept a made up one and insert it into their database?

kposehn 7y 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 7y 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).
runjake 7y 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 7y ago
  What resource(s) would you recommend for identifying compatible parts?
  - omnimus 7y ago

tdiggity 7y 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 7y ago
also Adobe software requires patches, which is a little bit more of a dealbreaker.
- iamjustlooking 7y 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 7y 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)...
cgb223 7y 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
- tdiggity 7y ago

nomanlagharipq 7y ago

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hashmymustache 7y ago

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

eralps 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

pottertheotter 7y 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.
- Wowfunhappy 7y 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!
DenseComet 7y 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.
agildehaus 7y 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.

buzzert 7y 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/ https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

dillonmckay 7y ago
What issues did you run into, or was everything supported onboard?
- buzzert 7y 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.
Hamuko 7y ago
The latest i9 NUCs look like a great Mac Mini replacement if they're Hackintoshable. Although they seem to be quite pricey.
- Rebelgecko 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

agildehaus 7y 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.
- Hamuko 7y 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.

x3sphere 7y 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 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 7y 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 :)
- Wowfunhappy 7y 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.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    do you have any resources to look at for setting this up?
    - 7y ago

paypalcust83 7y 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 7y ago
What guide did you follow for your setup?

cmurf 7y 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).

Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y 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-how-to-disable-discrete-gpu-permanently-from-efi#285896 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 7y 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-catalina-10-15-on-proxmox-6/ 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/ 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 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 7y ago
I run OSX under KVM with clover. I’ve used this guide: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

omnimus 7y 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.

Wowfunhappy 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

dreamer_soul 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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!