[Guide] Dell XPS 13 9360 on MacOS Sierra 10.12.x - LTS (Long-Term Support) Guide

[RehabMan]

Sorry, I'm trying to wrap my head around what is needed, but I'm still confused.

I need to run patch_nvme.sh directing to config_patches.plist then the resulting kext output goes into Clover/.../Other folder in the USB drive?

And I should run it in terminal from the loaded installer on USB so that it is patching based on the correct OS version?

Read the specific link provided as related to Hynix.

 

[markmark2]

Read the specific link provided as related to Hynix.

I think I did, you are referring to the InsanelyMac page? I can't find anything on the page 42 link referenced in your github readme.

 

[RehabMan]

I think I did, you are referring to the InsanelyMac page? I can't find anything on the page 42 link referenced in your github readme.

Link in the thread likely broken due to changes in insanelymac site software.
You should probably search the thread for Hynix.

As written in the README, look at config_patches.plist for the potential patches.

 

[markmark2]

Link in the thread likely broken due to changes in insanelymac site software.
You should probably search the thread for Hynix.

As written in the README, look at config_patches.plist for the potential patches.

Thanks, I'll search the thread. Have read through the config_patches.plist but not well versed enough to understand what I actually need. I'll search the thread for hints/instruction.

 

[RehabMan]

Thanks, I'll search the thread. Have read through the config_patches.plist but not well versed enough to understand what I actually need. I'll search the thread for hints/instruction.

It can only be one of the three potentially applicable patches. It is trial/error.

 

[torvaldz]

I'm having trouble installing HS. I can boot to the installer screen, but my SSD doesn't show up as a target drive.

I'm using the-darkvoid's clover folder (attached - copied from usb stick).

My SSD is a Hynix 500GB. (PC300 NVMe SK hynix 512GB as per windows system info).

Is it possible that I still need the class-code spoof for the HS installer to recognize the drive?

Your drive support 4k ( I got the same one) :

B) NVME 4k compatible drives (like all the OCZ-Toshiba NVME drives)
You can low-level format them to 4K LBA. Then, you will run the native NVME Apple driver without any sort of hack or patch. This is more desirable, future-proof than having an A) drive. Power management on NVME drives does not work properly on MacOS, so you'll experience a 10% impact on battery life, and warmer bottom-lid. Moreover, on XPS 9360, only 2 of 4 PCI-E lanes are enabled, so you won't experience hyper-fast transfer rates.

Here's how to 4k format:

0) Do a full Time-Machine backup. SSD will be formatted, all data will be lost.
1) Boot Ubuntu 16.10 Live USB
2) Enable Wifi by allowing third-party drivers through the "Additional Drivers" application
3) Enable Universe repo and reload repo database
4) sudo apt install smartmontools
5) sudo apt install nvme-cli
6) sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0

If the output is:

Code (Text):

Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt Data Metadt Rel_Perf
0 + 512 0 2
1 - 4096 0 1

Your drive supports both 512B and 4KB sector sizes.
[+] setting is the active one.
You can then switch [0] setting (512B LBA) to [1] setting [4KB LBA] by typing:

7) nvme format -l 1 /dev/nvme0
8) Remove SSDT-NVME, HACKRNVMEFAMILY.kext and/or Clover storage hotpatches from your EFI bootloader.
8) Do a time machine restore after formatting the SSD
9) After booting, disable again hibernatemode:

Code (Text):

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo touch /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm/sleepimage

10) You are now running 100% vanilla storage drivers. Trim is enabled by default.

 

[markmark2]

Your drive support 4k ( I got the same one) :

Thanks! That may be a better option.

 

[markmark2]

So managed to install and get up and running on 10.13.5

Reconfigured to 4k sector size, then all was good.

When I was in Ubuntu, the drive showed up a little funny, the text description when running smartctl said the drive was using 512 sector size, but where it listed both the supported LBA sizes, neither had the "+" in front of it.

My assumption is there was something in the SSD formatting that was preventing it from showing in the installer as 10.13 should natively support 512 sector size?

 

[hpbrown]

Hi
I'm about to try this on my XPS 9360
I didn't go through yet all the posts in this thread. Where's the link to download the archive with all your files.?
thanks

Introduction

I managed to install MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 on this ultrabook, and I plan to keep it for a long time (min 2 years) and use it as my daily-driver machine.

LTS - Long-Term Support

My commitment is to keep this thread organised for a long time (thus the "LTS" tag), and to report on the first post every community finding that further improves system functionality, reliability and performance.


Why such a long and detailed guide?

Because most Hackintosh build guides are minimal and focus on copy-pasting the OP-provided Clover directory.
I want this guide to be reproducible, so I described every non-trivial step, so we can share the exact same build.
In addition, thoroughly describing everything makes the build way more upgrade-resilient and useful even with future BIOSes, hardware revisions and MacOS versions.

I will try to be very specific and to describe every difficult step with detail.
This is NOT to encourage laziness. Do your homework and research before asking questions here.
Here are described only the steps which I found hard to understand and are specific to this laptop (e.g. BIOS extraction for DVMT patching). I will try to explain what every patch does, because you can't be a good hackintoshing if you are not eager to learn.

I am a long-time Hackintosh modder and user but in no way I call myself an expert, so feel free to correct me.
We have many gurus on this forum and on the web and it's all their merit/credit if we came this far.


Important note:

I kindly ask you to post replies and comment only if you have this very laptop model: XPS 13 9360.
This is a specific guide, not a generic learning/support thread.
For all the rest, Google is your friend.


OS TO INSTALL

MacOS Sierra 10.12.6, Windows partitions will be wiped.
Note: wipe Windows only after completing all the steps that require its use.


MY EXACT CONFIGURATION

XPS 13 9360
i7-7500U (Kaby Lake)
FHD (1920x1080) matte screen
256GB Toshiba NVME THNSN5256GPUK SSD <can be swapped for more battery life>
Killer Wifi 1535 (2x2 mimo) <has to be swapped>
8GB LPDDR3 1866MHz RAM
Bios 1.3.5
USA-International keyboard layout
Webcam (VendorID 3034, ProductID 22155)

RESULTS TO EXPECT

Working:

- CPU power management [1.0GHz @ 0.5W idle <-> 3.5GHz @ 24W+ under load, 4360|8850(CPU)|19200(GPU) GeekBench4 score]
- GPU Power management [0.0GHz (reported) idle <-> 1.05GHz under load]
- Sleep/wake [wake only by lid open or power button press]
- Shutdown
- Webcam with LED on-off switching properly working
- Microphones
- Speakers
- Headphone jack (with jack sense)
- Touchpad with semi-advanced multitouch gestures
- USB A 3.0 ports
- USB C 3.1 port (no hotplug)
- Prev/Play/Next keys
- Volume keys with OSD
- Brightness slider and OSD
- Brightness keys with smooth and full range of brightness + level persistence after reboot
- Keyboard backlighting with keyboard activation key and with custom timeout
- QE-CI (without menu bar glitches)
- Wifi 2.4GHz + 5GHz as native AirPort (BCM94352z / DW1560 swap)
- Bluetooth
- Perfect-match keyboard layout (for USA-Intl keyboards) via custom keyboard layout
- Battery / AC status
- NVME SSD with native Trim
- USB-A high-current output (1A max on the left, 2.4A max on the right)
- Retina / HiDPI scaled resolutions
- Airdrop
- USB-C Power Delivery battery charging ([email protected] minimum)
- External HDMI video+audio output


Not working (yet):

- SD card reader (a solution may appear in the next months)
- Hibernation (doesn't work properly on hackintoshes)


Unknown:

- BT4LE Handoff+Hotspot (they show as supported, not tested, may be country-code dependant)
- Thunderbolt via USB-C connector (you need another SMBIOS with native Thunderbolt 3 support)
- Intel Smart Sound Technology (SST) Audio DSP (unable to determine, should provide further battery savings during media playback)
- FileVault 2 (not configured, may work if proper Clover drivers are injected, not advised)


A note on coil-whine:

This laptop, as all the past-gen Infinity-display XPS 13, suffers from coil-whine. It is unnoticeable until the audio amplifier powers on. At that time, very annoying whine can be heard through speakers. Luckily, with proper Audio configuration, the amplifier turns on only when there's some sound to play, and then powers-off immediately. Coil-whine is a non-issue during typical office/library workloads.


A note on CABC:

This laptop suffers from display CABC. It's not fixable for FHD screens, because it's embedded in display firmware that is not flashable via OS.
The only solutions seems to swap the display. The part number should be Sharp LQ133M1JW01. If I won't be able to live with CABC, I'll try the swap with a non XPS13-specific OEM display.
Dell has finally released the tool to reflash Sharp FHD screen and disable CABC.
The improvement in maximum brightness is huge! Give it a try!

A note on keyboard backlighting:

You may want to change the default Keyboard Backlighting timeout (10s) and the way the keyboard resets the timeout when you interact with input devices. Surprisingly, you can! You need Windows installed. Download the official "Dell Feature Enhancement Pack", install it, open Control Panel->Keyboard and you'll be greeted with this tab:

Change it as you want. The change is permanent as a new value is written in a keyboard's controller registry.
NOTE: oddly, you can't revert to the original 10s timeout. Such a loss.


A note on SpeedShift (aka HWP aka Intel SST), XPCM and OS-driven Power management in general:

With vanilla SSDTs, Power Management (CPU+GPU) works beautifully.
I strongly advise you not to try HWP until we better understand it.
XPS line laptops is plagued with unrecoverable filesystem corruption and that seems to be triggered by changes in hibernatemode status or other deep-idle states that may be related to HWP, non-native NVME patches or other power management settings.
Don't be brave if you rely on this laptop for work, stick with my files until further notice. Trust me on this.
Many of you suggest to implement non-HWP OS-driven Power Management (with P states injected via SSDPrGen, using a non-HWP SMBIOS). In this particular system, in my opinion it is not required. All the CPU and GPU C+P states are reached without the need of any tweak. The system is responsive, way faster than on Windows, and has superb battery life. After many months of experiments with HWP and SSDTs, I found no proof of any battery nor performance advantage by using these tweaks. So, my advice is to stick with vanilla frequency stepping.
So, why the system is power-stepping even without the specific tweaks?
With this vanilla solution, you are using XNU power management.
It's a way to control power management that has been added to 10.10 kernel and works for Haswell+ platforms.
To check that xnu PM is working, you can type: sysctl machdep.xcpm and check whether machdep.xcpm.mode: is "1".


A note on NVME drives:

There are 3 types of SSDs you can install on this XPS machine:

A) NVME non-4k compatible drives (like all the Samsung NVME drives)
You need to spoof the PCI address of the drive, in order to run a non-native, patched NVME kext that supports 512b LBA-formatted drives. Do your research. You'll need to add NVME hotpatches to Clover to boot the installer, and then, on a fully-configured system, swap them with more the stable and safe HackNVME kext. Do your research in the General Topics section.
This is the least desirable SSD type you can have on your XPS. Power management on NVME drives does not work properly on MacOS, so you'll experience a 10% impact on battery life, and warmer bottom-lid. Moreover, on XPS 9360, only 2 of 4 PCI-E lanes are enabled, so you won't experience hyper-fast transfer rates.

B) NVME 4k compatible drives (like all the OCZ-Toshiba NVME drives)
You can low-level format them to 4K LBA. Then, you will run the native NVME Apple driver without any sort of hack or patch. This is more desirable, future-proof than having an A) drive. Power management on NVME drives does not work properly on MacOS, so you'll experience a 10% impact on battery life, and warmer bottom-lid. Moreover, on XPS 9360, only 2 of 4 PCI-E lanes are enabled, so you won't experience hyper-fast transfer rates.

Here's how to 4k format:


Here's the thermal scan for my Toshiba drive. Notice that PM is not working:
View attachment 308768

C) SATA M.2 drive (like all the Samsung 850 series M.2 drives)
These drives are a tad slower but work almost natively. Power management works very good. If you plan a SSD upgrade, go for this kind of drives, you'll experience 10% more battery life and completely cold bottom lid.
Remember to enable trim by typing: sudo trimforce enable.

Here's the thermal scan for my Samsung 850 Evo drive. Notice that PM is working very good:
View attachment 308769

A note on Wifi Country-Code:

For those outside the US, the super-country-code (aka local unknown) "#a" patch seems to be ideal if you want zero-issue, full speed 5GHz Wifi connectivity.
Add this to your Clover patches to remove Wifi channels regional limitations:

<dict>
    <key>Comment</key>
    <string>Patch CC to #a</string>
    <key>Disabled</key>
    <false/>
    <key>Find</key>
    <data>
    QYP8/3QsSA==
    </data>
    <key>Name</key>
    <string>AirPortBrcm4360</string>
    <key>Replace</key>
    <data>
    ZscGI2HrKw==
    </data>
</dict>

A note on external monitors:

DisplayPort/HDMI works via USB-C connector and "DP alternate mode" adapter.
It's also hot-pluggable and HDMI audio works perfectly.

USB-C socket provides many functionalities. Among the many cables that run through a (compliant) USB-C cable, there are some lanes that work natively as USB 3.1 data lanes. These lanes can be switched to other functionalities (aka "alternate modes") if requested by an active adapter. DisplayPort alternate mode works out of the box, providing us with full external monitor functionality. You just need a cheap USB-C -> HDMI/DP adapter that supports the alternate mode.

A note on USB-C charging (aka USB Power Delivery aka USB PD):

Here's a really good news: we can charge this laptop with increasingly-common USB PD chargers.
USB Power Delivery is a standard aimed at providing different voltages/currents on the same USB-C cable, after a digital negotiation between the host (the adapter) and the client (the laptop).

This laptop natively charges at 20V/2.25A, but it is able to accept less current, also supporting the 20V/1.5A profile.
That's very good because you can carry a very small wall adapter with you and still charge it, even while using it.

BE CAREFUL! FIRE HAZARD! Since USB-PD is a young standard, many adapters on the market now - even some of the most famous ones - do not negotiate the current properly and they tend to burn or overheat because they syndicate more current than they're able to deliver. Use a charger only after you are sure it is able to correctly negotiate the 20V/1.5A profile or above. Read the reviews and do your own research.

To check how much current your charger syndicates during the handshake, open BIOS settings and go to battery details. You'll see how much power the laptop will draw from the PSU. If that value is higher than the advertised power of the charger, throw it away immediately.

Note: on 30W chargers, you'll notice 5-10% reduced peak multicore performance, as "TDP-UP" CPU states will be disabled/decreased to reduce peak CPU power consumption to 15W max.

Another good news is that USB PD is reversible. The laptop can become the host, at maximum 5V/3A.


Upgrade-resilience:

You'll have to keep an eye on many things before a minor (or major) OS upgrade:

=> NVME patching (if you use it): not caring about this may lead to unrecoverable filesystem corruption.
As per RM guide, the update has to be carried this way:
- update via App Store
- wait for RehabMan to update the patch-nvme github project
- update your copy of the patch script
- generate new kext and swap the old one
The good about this method is that you are going to use the old kext until you manually re-patch the new one, so your system should remain bootable after minor upgrades, giving you time to safely swap the new kext.

=> Hibernation: Check that hibernation is still disabled (0) after update:

sudo pmset -g custom | grep "hibernatemode \|standby \|autopoweroff "

=> All the rest: Do your research and don't be the first-on-the-line to upgrade.


Further notes:

- Kaby Lake architecture and IPC are the same as Skylake. 10.12.6 finally does support Kaby Lake natively, and thanks to this, we get more performance and more battery life compared to our previous method of spoofing our Kaby Lake architecture to Skylake.
- DVMT patching is used instead of kext hotpatching as it's tricky to patch the framebuffer via Clover if it drops out of cache. Patching DVMT is dangerous. Do your research!
- No HWPEnabler kext nor Clover HWPEnable nor SSDPrGen are used. Paired with Macbook9,1 SMBIOS the system is snappy and CPU+GPU power management works pretty well.
- As many DELL machines, 9360 suffers from SMBIOS truncation bug, so Macbook9,1 is used. Clover has recently introduced a flag to overcome this limitation. If you want to USE a SMBIOS longer than Macbook9,1, enable that flag.
- Current BIOS 1.3.7 seems to break sleep for some systems. In that case, downgrade to 1.3.5.
- Current BIOS 1.3.7 might not be compatible with IFR extractor. In that case, downgrade to 1.3.5.
- New BIOS in the future = ideally, no need to patch ACPI again, as everything is hotpatched.
- HFSPlus.efi driver is not included in attached files for obvious reasons. Do your research.
- Standby is very deep, seems to lose just 1% battery every 3 hours, even with USB Powershare enabled in BIOS.
- The trackpad sensitivity and precision are horrible. The worst trackpad I ever used. But we managed to find a very good solution!
- To disable/enable the trackpad while using an external pointing device, press PrtScr key on internal keyboard (fantastic undocumented feature of RM VoodooPS2Controller).
- The webcam white LED correctly shuts down when the app using the camera is closed, thanks to a custom kext injection.
- I didn't install RM VoodooPS2Controller daemon as I don't need trackpad auto-disable when external mouse is connected.
- I prefer to leave S/L/E almost vanilla, so all the kext are injected via Clover. I know that some kexts don't like on-the-fly injection, but I didn't encounter issues so far.
- Custom keyboard layout is created with Ukelele app, and matches Euro and Rupee symbols on ANSI-INTL English keyboards. For different layouts, create your own layout.
- Complete the iMessage configuration with proper system serials before connecting to the internet for the first time.
- With battery level below 20%, CPU package TDP may be hard-limited to 15W, even with the charger connected, so performance will be slightly reduced. Do benchmarks with full battery!
- [Trivia] Dell's Fn+F7 "Unobtrusive Mode" is pretty cool.
- [Trivia] Dell's Fn+Ins puts the system into standby.
- [Trivia] Dell's Ctrl+Ins shuts down the system.
- [Trivia] The laptop can be fast-charged in ~1 hour by enabling "Fast Charging" in BIOS. Not recommended, faster battery wear will occur.
- [Trivia] The IGZO display in this laptop, compared to standard IPS ones, saves 30-40% of power while displaying moving images and up to 90% while displaying still images.


STEPS


Thoroughly inspect all the files in my archive:
I placed some dummy, empty files across the folders, to give you hints on some actions you have to do.
These files always start with "<" and always end with ">". E.g.:" <Put HFSPlus.efi here>".
Remove all these dummy files before trying to boot your build!


Read the generic How-To guide:

Read all this guide with care and attention: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/faq-read-first-laptop-frequent-questions.164990
Trivial questions or issues that can easily be resolved by reading the guide or looking at dedicated threads will be redirected and won't be answered here to avoid information duplication.


Wifi+BT card swap:

Swap the card to a BCM94352z (Dell branded one has code DW1560).
IMPORTANT: The NGFF slot is A-keyed. Some generic BCM cards are E-keyed only and won't fit.

Be careful when disassembling the lower aluminum plate. Use some plastic prying tool or a worn-out business card.
There are some flimsy plastic hooks in the central composite chassis that can be easily broken.
Be also careful, the bottom lid is aluminum and the edges are very sharp.
My advice is to always work with antistatic gloves when touching electronics.


BIOS Settings:

- Sata: AHCI
- Enable SMART Reporting
- Disable thunderbolt boot and pre-boot support
- USB security level: disabled
- Enable USB powershare
- Enable Unobtrusive mode
- Disable SD card reader (saves 0.5W of power)
- TPM Off
- Deactivate Computrace
- Enable CPU XD
- Disable Secure Boot
- Disable Intel SGX
- Enable Multi Core Support
- Enable Speedstep
- Enable C-States
- Enable TurboBoost
- Enable HyperThread
- Disable Wake on USB-C Dell Dock
- Battery charge profile: Standard
- Numlock Enable
- FN-lock mode: Disable/Standard
- Fastboot: minimal
- BIOS POST Time: 0s
- Enable VT
- Disable VT-D
- Wireless switch OFF for Wifi and BT
- Enable Wireless Wifi and BT
- Allow BIOS Downgrade
- Allow BIOS Recovery from HD, disable Auto-recovery
- Auto-OS recovery threshold: OFF
- SupportAssist OS Recovery: OFF


DVMT patching:

This is the first thing you have to do after properly updating your BIOS to the version referred in this guide and configuring it as above.
DVMT is 32MB and has to be set to 64M otherwise SKLFramebuffer kext will panic during boot.
This machine runs an InsydeH2O BIOS. Search for the guides.
The only difference is that the BIOS cannot be extracted from official BIOS update packages. If you open BIOS update package with Phoenix tools, only a portion of the bios gets decrypted and you won't find the DXE Core section that contains the DVMT variable. You have to extract the BIOS from your machine running windows with Universal BIOS Backup Kit 2.0.
Then, you can proceed as the guides tell you.
Use the following info just to confirm that you did things correctly: 1.3.5 BIOS DVMT var should be 0x785.

A note for QHD screens:
User @jkbuha reports that QHD screens require slightly different values. Be careful, var addresses may be different for you. It is advised to disassemble BIOS and check.




NVME ACPI path (if you need NVME patching):

Find your NVME ACPI path in Windows, write it down and put it aside.
This is the last step requiring Windows. You can wipe the partition.
Optionally, you can backup your Windows serial for future use. Search the web on how to do it.


Important: DSDT Patches not needed anymore, as we are using hotpatching now. Leaving all this work for reference, with strikethrough text formatting.

Continue in next post​

 

[R.MnTnA]

Hi
I'm about to try this on my XPS 9360
I didn't go through yet all the posts in this thread. Where's the link to download the archive with all your files.?
thanks

They are in the first post just sort of hiding with all those photos as attachments. You have to look carefully. It’s called Files-v9.01.zip