- Joined
- Jul 21, 2011
- Messages
- 379
- Motherboard
- Zbook G5 17"
- CPU
- i7
- Graphics
- AMD WX-4170
- Mac
I've finally hit a wall after 100's of hours trying to make this work.
This machine is probably the best hack laptop I've ever made. Battery, Sleep, Keyboard shortcuts, power management, native nvram, speaker, microphone, headphones, usb, thunderbolt, touchpad w/5 finger gestures, external displays, wifi, LAN, SD Card, bluetooth, nvme and sata drives, and IGPU with apple firmware loaded, hdmi with audio, dvi, thunderbolt video, DRM, GVA, filevault.
Basically the works!
Here's the catch...
Under High Sierra and Mojave I have a dual GPU system, the dGPU (AMD WX-1470) works and I've tested (2x 4k external displays) and if I disable the IGPU with whatevergreen bootflag igfxgl=1, I can force the dGPU to handle all the metal and opengl stuff even on the internal display, and DRM works, h264 hardware acceleration encoding, while the igpu handles h265, etc... a Dream basically.
Now for Catalina (and Big Sur)
Something changed... The same Open Core configuration stalls just as the display switches to apple logo and the progress bar gets to about 70%, then nothing....
I can run the installer, and no problem.
I can boot Catalina and Big Sur with bootflag -radvesa and everything is great, all of the above minus the AMD dGPU work fine.
So something in the AMD drivers is not working, and it doesn't matter if I use Hybrid or Discrete mode, OSX 10.15+ just refuses to work with the dGPU.
(In discrete mode I get a black screen and nothing changes that. pikera, vit9696, radeon deinit, etc...) only -radvesa works, but obviously no acceleration.
Today while doing some tests, I saw a line in the boot log that may be relevant, as I've never seen this in Mojave, and it happened on a stalled boot from Catalina.
If Lilu can't patch AMDSupport, then nothing will work past that point...?
With the flag -radvesa using IORegistryExplorer I can see the GFX0 device and the AMD9500 Controller kext loaded, so the device is there and fine, but I guess the AMDRadeonX4000_AMDBaffinGraphicsAccelerator could be causing trouble?
I tried different fake id's, and ROM's on the AMD card, and one actually booted, but the display connectors and sense ID's were wrong so basically the OS/drivers did not load. As soon as I edited the connectors or injected an edited framebuffer with connectors that would work, then Catalina boot would Kernel Panic or stall again.
I also tried different SMBioses but that didn't change any of my previous results.
There's not a lot of documentation regarding how the AMD patching works with Whatevergreen and especially for dual GPU unicorns like this laptop.
My current workaround is to have 2 hard drives with 2 Open Core efi's, One for Mojave with dual GPU's and one with radvesa for Catalina and I switch them at boot. But I really want to have dGPU on Catalina.
I appreciate any expert help with this.
Thank you!
This machine is probably the best hack laptop I've ever made. Battery, Sleep, Keyboard shortcuts, power management, native nvram, speaker, microphone, headphones, usb, thunderbolt, touchpad w/5 finger gestures, external displays, wifi, LAN, SD Card, bluetooth, nvme and sata drives, and IGPU with apple firmware loaded, hdmi with audio, dvi, thunderbolt video, DRM, GVA, filevault.
Basically the works!
Here's the catch...
Under High Sierra and Mojave I have a dual GPU system, the dGPU (AMD WX-1470) works and I've tested (2x 4k external displays) and if I disable the IGPU with whatevergreen bootflag igfxgl=1, I can force the dGPU to handle all the metal and opengl stuff even on the internal display, and DRM works, h264 hardware acceleration encoding, while the igpu handles h265, etc... a Dream basically.
Now for Catalina (and Big Sur)
Something changed... The same Open Core configuration stalls just as the display switches to apple logo and the progress bar gets to about 70%, then nothing....
I can run the installer, and no problem.
I can boot Catalina and Big Sur with bootflag -radvesa and everything is great, all of the above minus the AMD dGPU work fine.
So something in the AMD drivers is not working, and it doesn't matter if I use Hybrid or Discrete mode, OSX 10.15+ just refuses to work with the dGPU.
(In discrete mode I get a black screen and nothing changes that. pikera, vit9696, radeon deinit, etc...) only -radvesa works, but obviously no acceleration.
Today while doing some tests, I saw a line in the boot log that may be relevant, as I've never seen this in Mojave, and it happened on a stalled boot from Catalina.
If Lilu can't patch AMDSupport, then nothing will work past that point...?
With the flag -radvesa using IORegistryExplorer I can see the GFX0 device and the AMD9500 Controller kext loaded, so the device is there and fine, but I guess the AMDRadeonX4000_AMDBaffinGraphicsAccelerator could be causing trouble?
I tried different fake id's, and ROM's on the AMD card, and one actually booted, but the display connectors and sense ID's were wrong so basically the OS/drivers did not load. As soon as I edited the connectors or injected an edited framebuffer with connectors that would work, then Catalina boot would Kernel Panic or stall again.
I also tried different SMBioses but that didn't change any of my previous results.
There's not a lot of documentation regarding how the AMD patching works with Whatevergreen and especially for dual GPU unicorns like this laptop.
My current workaround is to have 2 hard drives with 2 Open Core efi's, One for Mojave with dual GPU's and one with radvesa for Catalina and I switch them at boot. But I really want to have dGPU on Catalina.
I appreciate any expert help with this.
Thank you!
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