PowerColor HD6850 patched kext [Guide to come]

lunar7 said:

Check back here soon for a guide on how to patch your kext for 100% working. I know for some people tricks like AtiConfig=Bulrushes and AtiPorts=4 works but not everyone. Here's the sure way to get your card working no matter which 6850 you have.

I finally finished patching the ATI6000.kext for my graphics card, the PowerColor HD6850, on Lion 10.7.4.

For me it was a bit mix and match, but there were lots of places I saved time by knowing which specific values to put whenever possible.

I might not get the chance to write the guide for a few weeks, so in the meantime anyone trying to get their card to work 100% should start with Alex Martinez's guide "XFX HD6850 Getting the Connectors to work" guide on InsanelyMac.
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index. ... pic=273937
(remove underscore from site name)

The idea is that you can get BIOS dumps for your card from two utilities for Windows each containing valuable information. They give you sure values for Transmitter, Encoder, and Sense ID (1st, 2nd and 4th value for last byte of each Personality entry, respectively). The HotPlug ID (the 3rd one) is the one you might have to play around with.

Also for me I got two sets of values from the dumps for both my DisplayPort and one of the DVI connections. I couldn't get the DisplayPort to work until I tried the 2nd set of values, and played with the HotPlug ID.

You can probably copy the first and second byte information for each entry from somewhere else, especially from somebodies entries in Alex's thread, or mine. Those seem to be the same for everyone.

So here's my Duckweed entry, my settings are GE=Yes and nothing for AtiPorts.

Duckweed: Offset: 176800 (64bit):
04 00 00 00 14 02 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 06 05 DVI-D
00 08 00 00 04 02 00 00 00 01 00 00 11 02 02 04 HDMI
00 02 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 21 03 03 06 DVI
00 04 00 00 04 03 00 00 00 01 00 00 22 05 05 02 DP
(I never bothered to change the equivalent entry for 32bit offset, but that perl script will tell you where to find it if you want to be thorough.)

The legend is like this:
Each byte is 8 digits, which actually represents 4 hex values. The first byte is connector type, which I think is fixed for everyone, so you can copy those values directly. Same goes for second byte, features. 3rd byte seems to be always 00010000 so that shouldn't need to be changed. It's the 4th byte where all the work needs to be done. The ordering is: Byte 4 (Transmit/Encode/HotPlug/Sense). So you get three of the four values from the BIOS dumps and only have HotPlug ID as the unknown. But if a number already works for a port, you don't reuse it. So that really reduces the amount of ID numbers to try. For me, I already had the two DVIs and HDMI working from copying another kext, so there were only really three HotPlug IDs left to try (I don't think they go any higher than 06, and 00 seemed to make my boot up hang). That left only 01, 04, and 05 to try. 05 worked for me with the 2nd set of values from the BIOS dump.

This is basically how you do this without just guessing and getting nowhere. Also don't bother trying to get it to work on Snow Leopard, at least that was my experience.

Hoping to hear that this works for someone else with the PowerColor brand. Also curious if it works for other brands or not.

Click to expand...