Interestingly, my 6 year old Hackintosh rig is still going strong and so I decided to upgrade it from macOS X Mojave to macOS 11 Big Sur. Since OpenCore is pretty well documented by now, I wanted to give it a try and replace Clover (which seems to use OpenCore as well by now).
However, the transition from Clover to OpenCore wasn’t smooth at all. OpenCore has quite a steep learning curve and I spent almost an entire, foggy November Sunday to get it all up and running.
The relevant system components in my Hackintosh are:
- Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H (BIOS rev. F10c)
- Intel Haswell Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
- Intel HD Graphics Intel 4600
- Onboard ALC Audio
- Custom flashed PCI Intel Gigabit CT NIC (so, not using onboard NIC)
Super helpful were:
- Dortanias OpenCore troubleshooting guide to navigate around preboot issues and kernel panics.
- CorpNewt’s USBMap
- Fewtarius’ CPUFriendFriend generator fork for the CPUFriend.kext (a Lilu plug-in) to enable the CPU’s Low Frequency Mode (LFM)
- CorpNewt’s MountEFI
- The OpenCore configuration sanity checker
A few additional notes:
- BIOS Settings as per recommendation for Haswell, see OpenCore docs.
- The Haswell DSDT provided by Dortanina resulted in a KP, use the ones provided in the link below.
- Use the CPUFriendFriend generator link above to create the data for the CPUFriendDataProvider. However, I’m not sure if the CPUFriend.kext actually makes a difference. I can see the CPU frequency dropping below 1 GHz in Intel’s Power Gadget though (see screenshot below) and I think the CPU fan is running a little quieter. Can be omitted when in doubt.
- Everything related to sleep/wake is working as expected.
- I didn’t include any kext binaries, make sure to always download the latest versions.
Check out my Github repository: github.com/trick77/opencore-ga-z97x-ud5h
