- Joined
- Jan 13, 2010
- Messages
- 2,830
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
- CPU
- i7-3770K @4.2-4.4GHz
- Graphics
- GTX 660 Ti
- Mobile Phone
Ok, so far we've tested with Asus, Gigabyte and MSI and all boards work, to an extent. Be aware that the patched Kernel isn't exactly as good as Apple's own and both the Asus and MSI board suffered from what I can only call some kind of a glitch where the USB seemed very laggy and locked up the mouse every few seconds. It's potentially that this was an issue with the systems I had, so I can't say for certain what the problem is and we haven't gotten around to compiling a DSDT, but it's possible to extract one on the UEFI boards.
Update: One thing I forgot about, the Asus board I was testing would not boot with 8GB of RAM installed, not sure why, but it would just reset as soon as OSX tried to load. Not sure if this is specific to this Asus board or not, but considering this is not a common model and I haven't had any of the regular boards, I really couldn't say.
The UEFI boards still requires a boot loader to be installed and even if you select GPT boot, you won't get into OSX without it. It's possible that the boot loaders can be simplified in the future, but currently this is an unknown factor. Hopefully some of the really good hackers will get their hands on Sandy Bridge hardware soon and can delve deeper into this. Please not that UEFI is not the same as the EFI that Apple uses, although Apple is likely to move to UEFI at some stage in the future.
And no, I haven't bothered testing the integrated graphics, as currently there's no form of support by OSX, so it would just be a waste of my time doing so.
I just want to point out one important thing that I've forgotten to mention so far, USB 3.0. You'll end up seeing a lot of boards with non NEC/Renesas chips on them and it's highly unlikely that these controllers will work with OSX as there are no drivers for them. Boards with VLI USB 3.0 hubs are fine though, as the hubs are transparent to the OS.
Other USB 3.0 host controllers will be on Asus, ECS and ASRock boards so far that I'm aware of and they either use Asmedia (Asus subsidiary) or Etron, although there's also VIA and Fresco Logic out there and presumably also Texas Instruments at some point. Until there's an OS USB 3.0 stack from Apple, this is going to continue to be an issue and to a degree, this is even an issue in Windows.
Update: One thing I forgot about, the Asus board I was testing would not boot with 8GB of RAM installed, not sure why, but it would just reset as soon as OSX tried to load. Not sure if this is specific to this Asus board or not, but considering this is not a common model and I haven't had any of the regular boards, I really couldn't say.
The UEFI boards still requires a boot loader to be installed and even if you select GPT boot, you won't get into OSX without it. It's possible that the boot loaders can be simplified in the future, but currently this is an unknown factor. Hopefully some of the really good hackers will get their hands on Sandy Bridge hardware soon and can delve deeper into this. Please not that UEFI is not the same as the EFI that Apple uses, although Apple is likely to move to UEFI at some stage in the future.
And no, I haven't bothered testing the integrated graphics, as currently there's no form of support by OSX, so it would just be a waste of my time doing so.
I just want to point out one important thing that I've forgotten to mention so far, USB 3.0. You'll end up seeing a lot of boards with non NEC/Renesas chips on them and it's highly unlikely that these controllers will work with OSX as there are no drivers for them. Boards with VLI USB 3.0 hubs are fine though, as the hubs are transparent to the OS.
Other USB 3.0 host controllers will be on Asus, ECS and ASRock boards so far that I'm aware of and they either use Asmedia (Asus subsidiary) or Etron, although there's also VIA and Fresco Logic out there and presumably also Texas Instruments at some point. Until there's an OS USB 3.0 stack from Apple, this is going to continue to be an issue and to a degree, this is even an issue in Windows.
