Hi Sniki et al,
I wanted to follow up with some feedback on using Sniki's guide with an i5 HP 8300
with a dGPU. In my case, I'm testing with a MSI Nvidia GT730 Kepler 2 GB graphics card,
and another system with a low profile MSI AMD RX560 4 GB, generally following Sniki's
guide. However, I have updated to Clover r5058 and some of the newer drivers.
I found some useful information from Hackintool and videoproc, which is a free download
at
www.videoproc.com, and by running some of the demos at
www.bitmovin.com/demos.
It is not necessary to activate videoproc to run these tests.
When my SMBIOS defines my machines as MacMini6,1, I find that Hackintool v2.7.8
reports in its "Info" that VDA Decoder fails, and if I look in videoproc "Settings" menu,
"Options" tells me that H264 and HEVC are both unavailable. You might have to hit
the update circular arrow to re-check availability.
Without changing the SMBIOS, it is possible to inject a different machine identity for the
purposes of using Whatevergreen. In the config.plist Boot menu, you can inject the following
boot arguments:
shikigva=40
shiki-id=Mac-FC02E91DDD3FA6A4
Alternatively, you can go to the Clover boot screen and go to the Options menu, where you
can insert these boot settings on a one-time test basis. By maintaining the SMBIOS machine
identification as a MacMini6,1, Sniki's configuration of the USB works normally.
For a further explanation, see post #16 in
So according to the crash report, it's pretty clear that AppleGVA is the culprit if I scroll down to the actual crash: Thread 16 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.FigASMF.InstanceManagement 0 com.apple.AppleGVAFramework 0x00007fff62ac2be3 0x7fff62a9f000 + 146403 1...
www.tonymacx86.com
The shiki settings tell Whatevergreen (WEG) that I am using the internal HD2500 IGPU graphics and the
dGPU graphics card, and that I want the graphics to be configured as though the machine is
a iMac13,2, which used an i5-3470 and had a Nvidia graphics card. If you want a different
graphics personality, you can look at Clover Configurator's SMBIOS menu, select a different
model using the lower right up/down arrow button, and copy the Board-ID as the shiki-ID
identification. If you want to ignore the internal IGPU, you should use shikigva=32 instead.
I have the dGPU set as the primary VGA in BIOS, and the iGPU set secondary, and WEG
automatically configures my IGPU as a headless framebuffer with AAPL,ig-platform-id = 0x10620007.
If you configure your IGPU as an alternative framebuffer with connectors, you may have to set the IGPU
as primary in BIOS to avoid the endless reboot problem.
When I configure the graphics shiki arguments as an iMac13,2, Hackintool tells me the VDA decoder is "fully
supported", and videoproc tells me that both H264 and HEVC are available.
When I go to the website bitmovin.com/demos, I can look at the DASH, HLS, or Progressive
steam test, or the DRM stream test. If I go there with the Safari browser with the DRM stream test,
it has an icon that shows me it recognizes the Safari browser with "Fairplay" DRM management.
I find that the DASH transmission standard fails, but Apple's "HLS" or "Smooth" work.
Today, Firefox released version 69.0 of its browser. With the new browser version, I tried to run Hulu
and it said it was downloading additional components. After they were downloaded, the DASH tests
pass and Firefox can now stream Hulu. However, if you go to the DASH, HLS, or Progressive test,
turn on "Use our Defaults" and switch to Apple's "Fairplay" as the DRM system, you get an error
message "DRM_NO_KEY_SYSTEM". Safari fails in the same way with DASH, and Safari fails when
attempting to stream Hulu videos.
I find that Firefox is now working for video streaming with Catalina and Hulu as well. However,
if you looking carefully at some of the background messages produced when updating HEVC
status on videoproc, it is complaining of errors on "kcVImageBufferTransferFunctionKey", even
though it concludes that HEVC is available.
So I hope I'm not getting too deep in the weeds here.
If you're using Sniki's recipe, it seems useful to retain your MacMini identification in SMBIOS, but to try
other video graphics identifications for graphics cards using the shikivga and shiki-id as boot arguments.
My systems with dGPUs appear to be most stable using the iMac13,2 (shiki-id=Mac-FC02E91DDD3FA6A4)
so far, and they perform well in Catalina too.
Lisa