OpenCore Legacy Patcher | Hacker News Reader

OpenCore Legacy Patcher

dortania.github.io

115 pointswebmobdev45 comments

If you're into senseless cursed technology like I am, you can install OpenCore's OpenDuetPkg onto a flash drive and use it as an emulated EFI environment with drivers, to load rEFInd to boot off a NVMe drive installed into a mPCIe slot, on computers predating EFI, let alone NVMe. The general approach is to follow https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/installer-... on a Mac (the Windows instructions produce a "BOOT MISMATCH!" warning and a 3-second delay, and there are no Linux instructions, and I don't know how to properly format the disks on Linux, though BootInstall_ARCH.tool should be easily portable to Linux), but after following https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/installer-..., extract a rEFInd archive (not ISO) into EFI/OC/, and rename the correct architecture's .efi file to EFI/OC/OpenCore.efi.

I haven't had much luck configuring OpenCore itself as an EFI bootloader, and having it find any of the USB/SATA/NVMe drives I have plugged in. I'm told you have to tailor the configuration carefully to the exact hardware you have since OpenCore is emulating a Mac-like EFI rather than generic PC, and that no generic configuration will work properly on all computers. I haven't tried using OpenCore for actual Hackintoshing.

> I haven't had much luck configuring OpenCore itself as an EFI bootloader

They mention in their "Terminology" section that OpenCore is not a Bootloader but a Boot Manager:

> Bootloader: Piece of software that loads an OS, usually made by the OS creators. OpenCore is technically not a bootloader per se (see boot manager explanation down below). Apple's Boot.efi would be the actual boot loader in a Mac.

> Boot Manager: Piece of software that manages bootloaders – we have many of these: Clover, systemd-boot, OpenCore, rEFInd, rEFIt... These are generally seen as prepping the system for the actual boot loader.

Happy user of Monterey on an early 2013 MacBook Pro which wouldn't have been possible without OpenCore's sterling work.

Can you expand on that? What couldn't you do normally that OpenCore allows?

It's usually reporting different hardware specifications to the OS and patching any issues this creates.

OpenCore allows you to run newer macOS on older Mac that Apple no longer supports. It supports many native Mac features such as SIP, FileVault, Secure Boot, etc. Here is a list of the Macs that it has been tested on - https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

Upgrade to Monterey. Not supported on my hardware.

May I ask some questions?

- After applying the post-install root patches, SIP will be (at least partially) disabled? Correct?

- Updates from Apple will work as usual or do you need to re-install the root patches after some of them?

I have a 2012 Mac Mini with Catalina and I'm wondering if it's worth to upgrade to Big Sur (without dealing with post-install root patches) or Monterey (root patches required for GPU drivers/SIP disabled).

I've got a MBP 2012 on Monterey. I'm not sure if SIP is disabled, I'll have to check. It's totally worthwhile, Monterey has run the smoothest of any OS so far.

You only need the root patches if you want Nvidia Kepler acceleration, you don't need it for intel graphics.

Actually, I'm running Monterey on mac mini late-2012 with i7 and 16G of RAM and if I don't apply the root patches, I don't have transparency or acceleration in the UI. After root patching for the first time and then installing apple patch later down the road, OCLP reminded me it needs to re-apply those patches.

Have another macbook air 11" (early 2014) that's stuck on Big Sur. Mentally valuing the options - last monterey patch fixed two 0-days, there's no patch for big sure. So is it better to go with Monterey and sacrifice a bit of SIP?

csrutil looks like this, FWIW: $ csrutil status System Integrity Protection status: unknown (Custom Configuration).

Configuration: Apple Internal: disabled Kext Signing: enabled Filesystem Protections: disabled Debugging Restrictions: enabled DTrace Restrictions: enabled NVRAM Protections: enabled BaseSystem Verification: enabled

This is an unsupported configuration, likely to break in the future and leave your machine in an unknown state.

I like Monterey a lot, seems to run perfectly on my old MBP and my Hackintoshes.

The OCLP project came a long way, at first it wasn't very stable, but with later versions it got better. Make sure you have the latest version and all works well.

What's the output of this command in your terminal?

   csrutil status

FWIW, I've installed Monterey on the 11" Air Early 2014 and indeed, no root patching is necessary. OCLP only needs to be installed in the EFI partition to boot.

csrutil status says "enabled." in this case.

Tangent: Did the switch to ARM put up more legal barriers than technical barriers for future ARM-based Hackintoshing?

Sure, lots of special features in Apple silicon, and probably not enough time or manpower to replicate them; but wouldn't it be easier to suppress such projects, via "trade secrets" or copyright or somesuch, that they are quickly taken down on the open web? With Intel there was still some limit on how much they could keep completely secret.

Apple has a pretty clear track record as far as this goes: they largely ignore it unless it’s attached to a business model effectively reselling their (free as in beer) software. They’ve made several gestures of support of being open to reasonable software flexibility around macOS and Mac hardware in principle, and sometimes materially contribute. Most recently they indirectly aided development of Linux on M* devices, released updates to Boot Camp, and have continued to produce freely downloadable OS images for so long I won’t bother characterizing the time span.

Apple has a lot of marks against them in terms of overall attitude towards software freedom, and hardware moreso, but they evidently don’t give a damn about a Hackintosh unless you’re selling them.

There's even been a lot of iOS/Mac apps developed and submitted on hackintoshes. Apple can probably pick out hackintosh users pretty easily (a few years back, one of their engineers griped about logs coming from hackintoshes being junked up and effectively useless), but up until now have not chosen to act on that, probably because they only stand to lose by kicking these users out of their ecosystem.

From what I understand, the reason why we are still able to run newer macOS through OpenCore on older, unsupported Intel Macs is because these newer macOS are still supported on older Intel Mac Pros. Once Apple starts releasing ARM only macOS, we will no longer be able to run it on any Intel machines (except through virtualisation).

OpenCore is nice, but funnily enough it's still subject to the same "supported hardware" crap - I was tooold that macOS 10.14 won't run on my 10th gen Intel CPU, because the CPU is "too new". I haven't been able to get it to boot using OpenCore yet, so there's a pretty good chance that's accurate, but it's pretty depressing, considering how x86 is supposed to be backwards compatible and all.

For what it’s worth I have Opencore running on 12900k without a hitch

But x86 is backwards compatible, it is Mac OS that is neither backwards nor forwards compatible. Windows NT4 up to v10 will run on anything from original pentium to latest 12 gen intel and most AMD CPUs. Windows 11 will also run on all 64bit x86 CPUs but it won't install without some fiddling.

With Mac OS the drivers are packaged in the OS itself. So older OSes may not have drivers for things like graphics on newr systems.

Your 10th gen will run just fine with OpenCore and the proper settings. People are running it with 12th gen CPUs.

I haven't looked into it, but I'm guessing that sibling comments reporting newer Intel CPUs working will require spoofing to make them look like 9th gen CPUs (similar to how AMD machines are hackintoshed).

This is assuming that the machine in question is a desktop with a supported (basically just recent AMD) GPU, though — macOS isn't capable of GPU accelerated UI using the iGPU on 10th (or maybe 11th, not sure) gen and up because the drivers aren't present in the OS.

Now I'm curious if it's possible to boot up 10.6 or 10.9 on new hardware.

For newer Intel hardware, 32 bit support would be an issue

Why would it be? AFAIK the latest x86 CPUs, despite using EFI BIOS, still start off in 16-bit realmode at the reset vector, and most if not all of the BIOS code is going to be 32-bit protected mode code.

There was a thread about running older versions of OSX and macos:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31164521

In that thread, you get to learn how you can run latest chromium on Maverics. Firefox is a toast now. General rule of thumb being don't run old OS and old browser on internet-facing machine.

you could still get mac minis that would run 10.9 officially without the headaches. (2012 vintage ...)

EDIT: There are drivers missing for newer hardware in 10.6-10.9. Haven't tried if OCLP could help with this.

I’ve just bought a ‘new’ GFX card (sapphire pulse rx570 8gb) for my ‘old’ 2010 Mac Pro (12 core, 3.66ghz, 128gb ram, many many disk and ssd drives). I am getting ready to install open core or rEFInd on it in the new few weeks.

Stunning work by these people keeping these machines up to date. I can’t thank the community enough for the effort!

OpenCore is a God-send for old Mac Pros which can even run Monterrey with some hardware and driver changes.

Tack on question: Is it easy enough to boot directly into Linux on older Macs?

Anything pre-T1/T2 is pretty straightforward in my experience since those models are more or less just typical x86 PCs with EFI. It used to be more hairy on T1/T2 models but from what I've heard the process on those has improved.

Thanks!

Used Debian and Ubuntu on Macbook Air 2015 before. In ubuntu everything works out of the box, but camera - you need to compile your own driver from github. You pay a bit in battery life and heat for having an FOSS operating system - ballpark being 5h vs 7h. Fan gets audible too compared to macos.

At some point, this macbook started to freeze with lots of % in sys in linux while doing not so much. Reinstalled macOS back, but had a problem with exactly 10s freeze the world on every wifi reconnect, totally reproducible. Took me 2-3 months to realize that there's something called SMC that could be re-set. This fixed it back, but I stayed on macos/Monterey for now.

OpenCore is great, I used it to make Hackintoshes before I bought a MacBook. The Apple Silicon benefits were too great. I wonder how Hackintoshes will be once Apple fully transitions to ARM.

I have an ancient MacBook Pro 5,2 from 2010 which I installed the latest Monterey onto with OCLP. It works great except for GPU acceleration, which means maps doesn't work.

Could this be used to run older versions on macOS on newer hardware (eg. Catalina on a M1 machine) ?

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