First off, this is my first post in years but been lurking and learning here since probably 2011 - although still feel like a massive novice. Second, I think the Build Signatures are broken because I don't seem to be able to make mine update at all.
I am having an issue installing Big Sur - I can boot the installer, complete the first graphical part of the install and reboot. On the reboot I select the Mac OS Installer on my SSD for Big Sur, this time it boots to the progress bar, then mouse pointer appears with the progress bar, screen goes black, shows a spinning logo for a second and reboots. Then this just keeps happening in a loop. When this happens even with the -V boot-arg Its already switched to graphical progress bar so I can't see where its failing.
Its an MSI X299 Pro, i9 10940x, Radeon RX 560, 2x Sabrent Rocket NVMe drives. Opencore 6.3.
I followed the Dortania guide to the letter for manual SSDT builds specific to my machine.
I have a perfectly functioning Catalina 10.15.7 build, sleep, wake, USB map, DRM everything seems to work perfectly except perhaps NVRAM. More on that in a second...
I initially suspected either EC or RCT0-RANGE as the problem because there is some weirdness with this motherboard:
- It has no EC device. In Windows device manager there is no entry for "ACPI Embedded Controller" or similar. And searching the dumped DSDT for PNP0C09 finds "0" results.
- It has both an AWAC and RTC device, with I think, a property that switched (STAS I'm barely even a beginner at ACPI!) to switch between the two, but it also seems to be missing the mapped section for the RTC device (0x70 range, 0x2 length)
- Opencore requires npci=0x2000 boot-arg to boot
I have manually created SSDT's and Im pretty sure they are now working correctly.
In IoregExplorer I can see an EC device the name "ACID0001" and a newly created RTC0 device with name "PNP0B00" (and no old RTC device) with the two ranges properly mapped - address 0x70, length 0x4 and address 0x74, length 0x4.
I have tried a number of things suggested in the Dortania guide including adding vsmcgen=1 to boot-args and replacing VirtualSMC with fake SMC, with and without NVMEfix.kext and WEG but the behaviour is always the same.
Regarding my NVRAM, I have noticed that my while my custom SSDT-PMC at least shows a PMCR device with name "APP9876" in IoregExplorer, it doesn't appear to be working as NVRAM should - Opencore doesn't save any changes to "startup disk" for example.
So I have a couple of questions and one favour to ask:
- What is the best way for me to debug and collect or view log files to find out more about exactly what point its rebooting if -V is no longer showing the verbose output? It starts to show but once the screen shuts off and comes back with a progress bar and mouse pointer there is no verbose output to see anymore.
- Is this potentially related to a non-functioning NVRAM implementation - If so some guidance in fixing that would be appreciated.
- Could someone take a look at my custom SSDT's and give them a sanity check given my novice editing
(EFI folder attached with the SMBIOS cleaned and I removed resources and tools folders to reduce size, please let me know if you'd like to check the original DSDT dump, I'll add that too)
Thanks in advance for any help - and hopefully this can be worked through to another success so we can add another motherboard and config guide to the thread.