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

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I've tried setup_var, setupvar, and setvar, setvar works but doesn't let me change the values it says, the other two aren't recognized as commands, doesn't appear in the help section either. No idea what I'm doing wrong.

Search Insydeh20 DVMT patching or something like that in this forum (sorry can't really remember which one), after u read the 1st post in this thread regarding the DVMT patching. Search result should returns a guide that can be loosely followed to do the patching.
 
Note that the Shell64U.efi which has setup_var functionality is not included in Clover by default.

DVMT.efi
has the setup_var command, replace your Shell64U.efi with it and start the EFI Shell through Clover tools.
 
Well I was cranking away some work on my lovely XPS 13 Hackintosh today when, suddenly, the screen started going nuts. Things were streaking, horizontal lines flashing everywhere, random blue pixels all over the place. Same issue when I booted - Dell issue flickering with lines coming off of it, etc. Figured something went bad with the DVMT patching (which had worked for about a week) so I went in the BIOS and restored. I knew it would cause OS X to kernal panic, but I figured I'd just patch it again, right?

Wrong. I got maybe one or two more POSTs out of it, and then nothing. The whole laptop is DOA. No Dell logo, no BIOS, no Clover. Can't recover the BIOS using the Dell method and USB key either.

Any clue what's up? Should I just swap the old card back in and warranty it to Dell? Based on the behavior I'm inclined to think it's a logic board issue.

Really put a drag on my day :(
 
@mtbfrc,

Such a violent reaction sounds more like you could have left a screw or other metal inside the laptop when replacing the WiFi card.
 
The OP states that NVME power management does not work very well in OSX. But then just below states PM working very well on the Samsung 850 evo? A little confusing!

Does anyone with the 1tb drive know if they are usually Samsung ?
 
Samsung 850 EVO is not NVMe.

I'm using the 1TB done, PM works fine.
 
Dell released a new BIOS version 2.4.2. It seems to update Intel ME, fan control as well as some other checks.
So far it works on my system without a problem.
 
I'd hold off from updating to 2.4.2 for now. The points in the changelog are particularly worrying:

Code:
Fixes:
Updated the handling of physical presence checks in firmware.
Updated the handling of pre-boot authentication information by firmware.
Updated UEFI variable input validation.
Updated the handling of 3rd party Option ROM loading.
Updated SPI flash command configuration settings.
Enhancements: Optimize CPU loading to Improve EE noise.

I suspect some changes have been made to optimise the coil whine (in Win 10) but otherwise doesn't look like good news for hackintosh or bios modders.

UPDATE: Seems like my suspicions were right. From the 'Important Information':
When the system is upgraded to BIOS version 2.4.2 or later, the system will not allow downgrading to BIOS version 2.3.1 or any previous version.
 
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Seems like the bold text gut missing in your quote. But I guess you are referring to the UEFI checks and input validation.
All I can say is, that DVMT patching still works fine on my machine.

Additionally one could flash back the old BIOS including Intel ME by using the internal service switch. According to the XPS 9350 Skylake schematics (Which I guess are largely identical to our model) floating around the net one has to bridge the service mode switch from PIN 2-3 shorted to Pin 1-2 shorted.

Maybe this method could also be used to allow for a custom BIOS?
 
I suspect the DVMT patching is still working because the existing DVMT variable has not been reset in NVRAM. Could you try doing the following:

1) booting into the EFI shell and see if setup_var still works
2) dumping the UEFI variables to text file using the usual method

Custom BIOS requires disabling of Bootguard, which at the moment can only be disabled through another method which I'm not going through here (as it seems to be patched by BIOS 2.4.2).

If you've upgraded to 2.4.2, the only known way to downgrade would be to flash the SPI, but the WSON chips in the 9360 don't allow for an SPI programmer unless you desolder, flash and resolder (spoiler alert: highly risky).

I'm going to try bridging SW1 to see if we can unlock the descriptor - hopefully you'll have another method.
 
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