My Hackintosh experience

...while installing macOS Mojave (10.14) on Dell Inspiron 5567.

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Contents

• Part 1 : Denial, Anger, Bargain.
  • Build Specifications
  • Introduction
  • The Install Media
  • The Install Process
• Part 2 : Depression, Acceptance.
  • The Good
  • The Bad
  • The Ugly
  • Lessons Learned

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Part 1 : Denial, Anger, Bargain.

Build Specifications

Device Make & Model	Dell Inspiron 5567
Motherboard	Dell 0C6XG5
CPU	Intel i5-7200U (Kaby Lake)
Graphics (Integrated)	Intel HD Graphics 620
Graphics (Dedicated)	ATI Radeon 445M
Wireless Card	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165
Audio Card	Realtek ALC3246 (ALC256)

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Introduction

Like the name suggests, Hackintosh is indeed full of hacks and requires a lot of patience.

But why macOS/Hackintosh?

Wanted to try it out for the longest time. I have worked with every version on Windows since XP and have played around myriad of Linux distros for almost a decade. The only thing I felt was having an OSX install on my laptop. And after all these years, I finally felt like doing it.

Why macOS Mojave? Wasn't High Sierra more stable than Mojave?

"New is always better." - Barney Stinson I wasn't going to settle for anything that is not the latest in the market.

Where did I start?

Google > "hackintosh" > First result was from hackintosh.com. Browsed the site for few minutes and it later redirected me to tonymacx86's forum. And the rest is history.

Many sites, blogs, YouTube videos helped along the way, but reading RehabMan's guides (word-to-word) on tonymacx86's forums had every answer.

How did I go about it?

There are few main steps for installing Hackintosh on a laptop/desktop -

1. Create the macOS install media.
2. Install the Clover bootloader (Clover:macOS :: Grub2:Linux) on EFI partition of the USB.
3. Configure the BIOS per the requirements of macOS.
4. Boot into Clover bootloader.
5. Verify options, kexts (Kernel Extensions), drivers and boot into macOS.
6. Clean the entire HDD and install macOS.
7. Boot into the new install.
8. Identify broken and missing pieces of the OS and try fixing them.

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The Install Media

The installation media a.k.a bootable USB of macOS can be created only using macOS. It's very frustrating but Apple cannot be blamed. Apple anyway does not mean to distribute macOS without a real Macintosh. But even then there is a way to create macOS install USB using PC. Virtual Machine. The hackintosh community strongly suggests against using VMs for creating the install media because it often fails. I had no other option except using VM. I went ahead with it. I was skeptical about it too, but it did work.

First, I downloaded the VM image of macOS Mojave. Booted it using VMware. There is a whole different process just for booting macOS in VMware/VirtualBox.

After booting the VM, I created the installation USB. Then mounted the EFI partition on the USB and pasted a generic, latest Clover bootloader on it. Didn't mind looking into the config.plist file or any other details.

Obviously, I was wrong. The config.plist file is the most crucial part of the entire process. It has hundreds of attributes and parameters that can be configured or modified in a thousand ways. And there are only handful configurations that are right for your device. One change and the installer goes into a Kernel Panic resulting in a crash. I spent about 3 days playing around with the .plist file, obviously because I was an idiot. If I had carefully read RehabMan's posts on forums, I would have booted the installer within mere minutes. Turn's out RehabMan has created a set of config.plist files according to specific Graphics cards. I just had to look for mine, rename it, and put it in /EFI/CLOVER/ path of the bootable USB. I didn't feel any shame in using it directly because it is indeed a difficult task to build a config file from scratch.

P.S. The whole process sucked 24GB of my bandwidth. The VM was 6GB and the Mojave image was another 6GB. Only thing is that I did it twice.

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The Install Process

After booting into the setup, I wiped the entire HDD that had Windows and Debian installed on it. It is a tiresome process to dual boot Windows + macOS because:

1. The macOS/OSX needs the EFI partition to be 200MB, as compared to the default size which is 100MB. This might be a precautionary thing by Apple.
2. The macOS install partition/system partition Mac HD should be the next to EFI partition on HDD.

Instead of going through the trouble of moving and freeing partitions, I found it best to wipe the entire HDD clean for the macOS install.

A partition Mac HD needs to be created with Mac OS Extended (not APFS) journaling (like ext4 on Linux or NTFS/exFAT on Windows). The rest process is simple Agreeing to T&C and setting up user account installing Mojave. Takes several reboots and few retries (yes, the entire process) to finish the installation and it boots to the Welcome page where it asks for user password. That was it.

It was a great feeling.

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Part 2 : Depression, Acceptance.

After selecting the newly introduced Dark theme option in macOS, the dark Desert Mojave wallpaper soothed my eyes. But the battle was far from over. I knew there were going to be some problems. After running the standard checks on the hardware - Audio, Graphics, WLAN, Power, Trackpad and Keyboard - it was clear that none of them worked perfectly. Fortunately, some didn't need workarounds and hacks at all (The Good), few needed some hacks to make them work (The Bad) and the others never worked (The Ugly).

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The Good

• Graphics : This was a strange “issue”. Those who complained about not having graphics acceleration said that they only had some 4MB or 7MB of graphics memory. Also they said that their system didn’t detect any graphics card (on their System Information). Now why was this strange to me was because I had neither of the problems. My System Information showed me Intel HD Graphics 620 as graphics with a 1536MB of video memory. Which is perfectly fine. And I thought that I wasn’t getting the required acceleration because - get this - there was not magnification effect on the dock that macOS typically has. Turned out Mojave had it disabled by default for unknown reasons and I just had to enable it from System Preferences. Stupid me.
• Keyboard : The layout (obviously) does not match the MacBook’s keyboard. The Cmd key did’t work and the Option key (Alt) behaved very strangely. After some forum digging and YouTube, turned out there was an easy fix for that: The Cmd and Option modifier keys needed to be altered/remapped to fix their behaviour. And it is easy. System Preferences > Keyboard > General tab > Modifier Keys. Do the required changes and close. Kinda cool that Apple, famous for their user controlling behaviour, natively supports a little of keyboard remapping in macOS *gets amused in Windows*.

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The Bad

• Trackpad : The trackpad refused to detect whatsoever. But I was never worried about it and was almost sure it would work after a fix. Spoiler Alert: It was because of the power issue.

• Battery Indicator : The problem with battery is because of this: macOS failed to recognise the computer as a laptop although the SMBIOS in Clover’s .plist makes it look like a MacBook Pro 14,2. From what I have read, battery indicator and other battery related fixes needs the DSDT to be patched manually since recent releases of macOS and the old kexts didn’t work. DSDT patching includes writing and editing machine code. Changing register values and bringing them down to 8-bits each. When I disassembled and opened the DSDT file, I saw that the registers were already 8-bit. NO MANUAL PATCHING was required. So I quickly used the old kext patch and the battery indicator appeared. Now the OS stared recognising the hardware as a laptop. This fixed another issue I had. The trackpad. Now that OS understood that the computer was a laptop. It quickly showed me the trackpad settings and gesture settings (which by the way, still don’t work).

• Audio : This probably was the fix that required real working and testing because all other fixes were simple even though I thought they were difficult to fix and might need a lot of work to fix them. In audio’s case, it required many things to be taken care of and needed lots of testing. AppleALC kext was the main player during the audio hunt. The install procedure was simple. You just had to look up if your codec (a.k.a the Audio card) is supported by AppleALC and install the kext under /Library/Extensions path if the answer was yes. And then lookup the layout-id of the codec and configure the Clover config.plist accordingly. My codec was supported (ALC3246/ALC256). I installed the kext and changed the layout-id (mine was 13) as instructed. Audio didn’t work. I tested with various layout-ids. Got the same result every time. Then according to a post, I used Intel FrameBuffer patcher to generate a patch for the audio. I opened it and generated a patch. Then manually edited the Clover’s config.plist and added the following to it:

  1. ACPI > Enabled: FixHPET, FixIPIC, FixRTC, FixTMR.
  2. Devices > Audio > Inject > 13
  3. Devices > Properties tab > + under devices > Add PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1f,0x3) > In Right pane > Add layout-id Properties Key > 0D000000 Properties Value.

• Audio (contd.) : Also yet another kext, CodecCommander needed a custom edit to support ALC256 codec. I don’t remember what I edited there but I have a backup, just in case. Even after doing so there was no audio. After some log hunting into the system, I found out that AppleALC had failed to load. The main culprit. In order to fix that I read a lot about AppleALC kext. Found that AppleALC inherits some functions from Lilu kext, which was already available in Clover’s kexts (/CLOVER/kexts/other). I tried to put both AppleALC and Lilu kexts on EFI partition in Clover directory but it sill didn’t load. So I moved both extensions to /Library/Extensions directory and rebooted. The audio worked on the next boot.

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The Ugly

• WLAN : Oh the horror. Now this was a real issue. No kext patch or DSDT patch for the WiFi card I have in the laptop (Intel AC3165 Dual Band). There was no way to fix it because a group of kext enthusiasts had tried fixing it in past. "3 years ago", said the GitHub repo’s last commit. There was no option, everyone on various forums roared. It was because Apple doesn’t include any Intel related network cards and so there was no official Apple’s patch to refer to and make a supporting driver out of it. The only solution was to replace the WLAN card with a macOS compatible card. The easier solution was to get a USB WiFi adapter. But many people on the forum were skeptic about it because of the drivers. They don't always work. But I gave it a try anyway. Bought a TP-Link WN823N adapter and installed it. To my relief, it worked flawlessly.

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A list of kexts used under /CLOVER/kexts/other/:

1. FakeSMC.kext
2. SATA-unsupported.kext
3. USBInjectAll.kext
4. VoodooPS2Controller.kext
5. WhateverGreen.kext
6. Lilu.kext

The contents of /CLOVEER/drivers64UEFI/:

1. ApfsDriverLoader-64.efi
2. AppleImageLoader-64.efi
3. AptioMemoryFix-64.efi
4. DataHubDxe-64.efi
5. FSInject-64.efi
6. HFSPlus.efi
7. SMCHelper-64.efi

List of kexts installed by me under /Library/Extensions/:

1. ACPIBatteryManager.kext - Fixes battery indicator.
2. AppleALC.kext - Required for audio fix.
3. CodecCommander.kext - Required for audio fix. (Custom Info.plist - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VbzI66V8zsRa1STRAnHqMZbWtQGlrjeG).
4. FakePCIID_Intel_HD_Graphics.kext - Not sure if it is required.
5. Lilu.kext - should be under `/EFI` partition, but I’ve kept it with `AppleALC`.

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Lessons Learned

• I should definatly start reading the documentation more carefully and thoroughly. Doing so would have saved around three days duing the 'Hackintosh Project'.
• Booting and fixing Hackintosh was even more thrilling experience than installing and setting up Arch Linux.
• Hackintosh is very similar to Android ROMs. Each and every device has it's specific Kernels, Frameworks, Device Trees, Vendors. In Hackintosh, every build is very specific. This is in contrast to Windows and Linux where drivers can easily be found and installed (Windows) and where the kernel has all the necessary and popular drivers (Linux). macOS kernels are modular. They exclusively use extensions called kexts to kind of "patch" the kernel on the fly. Interesting.