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

[kylec]

I tried the CPUFriend posted by @zanzy, as it matches my CPU. The CPU package power at idle, as reported by Intel Power Gadget, is the same, at about 1.5W, for me. This is measured with the display sleeping, which gives me the lowest reading, naturally.

I lost only a very slight amount in Geekbench score, but still, it appears that, yes, it's true there aren't power savings to be had from lower clocks, past a certain point. Perhaps it's not universally the case- I don't know. I only have 2 cores, and some of you have 4, which is a pretty big difference.

Anyway, this testing led me to the discovery that, for this machine at least, the "pmset -b displaysleep" setting isn't persisting. It resets to 10 minutes after every reboot. I'd like to find a fix for this! Though I guess I could just kluge it with a startup script.

 

[Johann7]

Thanks for providing that walkthrough video Mark, it was definitely helpful in a few steps that I had not gotten correct in my build.

I have managed to get Mojave 14.0 (not 14.0.2) installed on my XPS 9360 using your video, Darkvoid's setup, and the many comments/suggestions on this thread and others.

I am dual-booting with Windows (which I had to reinstall from scratch after reformatting to 4k sectors) and am using Clover as my boot loader for both OSX and Windows 10.

I am using the VoodooHDA for Audio, as I have not had luck with the AppleHDA or AppleALC Kext, but I have not added additional Layouts as per the Mojave guide, which may be required. My issue with the audio (so far) is that the microphone gain is set way too high, and doesn't appear to be adjustable making video conferencing not possible with the onboard mic. I'm also not using the ACPIBattery kext in Darkvoid's GitHub as per Mark's suggestion. On preliminary studying of it, it shouldn't be affecting the issue I am seeing below. I'm injecting the majority of the main kexts in CLOVER, rather than installing them in /Library/Extensions, so I'm not sure if that's an issue or not.

The biggest issue I am getting though, is consistent full-machine freezes where the screen blanks out, as is from sleep, but cannot be woken up, and the machine needs to be hard-booted by pressing the power button down for several seconds. This only seems to happen when the machine is going into some sleep/C-State mode. (I have C-states enabled in BIOS), and have specified all of the other recommended BIOS settings as per the original guide.

Any idea why I'd be getting these hard-crash/freezes? I've attached my CLOVER directory from EFI, my output from IOReg, console output from the various kext commands, and the DSTD files.

Any help with fixing the frequent (I think) sleep related freezes, and possibly the microphone gain issue would be greatly appreciated. I haven't tried upgrading to Mojave 14.0.2 as when I tried initially, the lack of trackpad support in the installer prevented me from selecting my OSX APFS drive, even with keyboard shortcuts. From the release notes on Apple, it doesn't appear that this is that important of an update, but if it's recommended to stability, I can give it a try.

Many thanks,
-Nate

So, in my testing, this really only seems to occur when the machine is asleep, and even after disabling C-States in the BIOS, it still does it. Any other suggestions about fixing sleep related stability issues? Disabling sleep does seem to fix it, but that's not a great solution, especially for being on battery.

 

[kylec]

Any other suggestions

Did you use pmset to disable hibernation? (hibernatemode = 0)

 

[egore]

Could you share your kext here? I'll be back tomorrow so will be able to add/change as required.

Thanks

Here you go. i7 8550U and MacBookPro15,1

 

[DimitrisG]

I tried the CPUFriend posted by @zanzy, as it matches my CPU. The CPU package power at idle, as reported by Intel Power Gadget, is the same, at about 1.5W, for me. This is measured with the display sleeping, which gives me the lowest reading, naturally.

I lost only a very slight amount in Geekbench score, but still, it appears that, yes, it's true there aren't power savings to be had from lower clocks, past a certain point. Perhaps it's not universally the case- I don't know. I only have 2 cores, and some of you have 4, which is a pretty big difference.

Anyway, this testing led me to the discovery that, for this machine at least, the "pmset -b displaysleep" setting isn't persisting. It resets to 10 minutes after every reboot. I'd like to find a fix for this! Though I guess I could just kluge it with a startup script.

My opinion is that even cpu running at lowest freq , battery consumption remains the same if we don't lower the voltage the cpu is working at this freq.

 

[Johann7]

Did you use pmset to disable hibernation? (hibernatemode = 0)

Yeah, I have disabled hibernate mode as per the original post using the pmset commands.
The output of pmset -g is:

standby              0
standbydelaylow      10800
halfdim              1
hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
proximitywake        0
gpuswitch            2
powernap             0
disksleep            0
standbydelayhigh     86400
sleep                0 # I've disabled this for stability, but would like to sue
autopoweroffdelay    28800
hibernatemode        0
autopoweroff         0
ttyskeepawake        1
displaysleep         0
tcpkeepalive         1
Standby Battery Threshold 50
lidwake              1

 

[Johann7]

Hi Mark,
Thanks for linking this. I'll give a try with the AppleALC and remove the Voodoo one and look into the sleep specific issues.
Thanks!

So, I did those fixes, and while initially, it only recognized the line-in for audio input, it eventually saw that I had a built-in mic, and it appears the input levels are fixed.

And for sleep, I reenabled it, and, perhaps it was the alcid=56 boot option, or the use of the AppleALC kext, but it seem to be working! This is a huge improvement!
Many thanks!

 

[kylec]

Again, I'm interested if anyone else finds the USB C to be not working with USB 3 devices? I've found this thread now: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/usb-c-hotplug-not-working.223534/post-1629770

For myself, setting RMV to one is all it takes for reliable USB-C hotplug

The change mentioned is included in @the-darkvoid 's SSDT-TYPC.dsl file, and my bdmesg output shows this SSDT being successfully loaded, yet in MaciASL I don't see any _RMV method on RP01.PXSX. Only the renamed XRMV from the Clover hot-patching. I also tried a simplified SSDT-TYPC with just that one method, returning one, but the result was the same.

Previously, I've always static patched, so I'm not sure what to do here.

Anyway, this testing led me to the discovery that, for this machine at least, the "pmset -b displaysleep" setting isn't persisting. It resets to 10 minutes after every reboot. I'd like to find a fix for this! Though I guess I could just kluge it with a startup script.

@RehabMan, if you have any idea on either one of these, thanks.

 

[jkbuha]

Hi all,

I've updated my configuration based on the i7-8550U chipset, with amended CPUFriend configuration as well.

Points to note:
1) The closest Apple hardware to this config is the MBP15,2 (i7-8559U with no GPU), so I've rebased the config based on this chipset.
2) Previously I was averse to using CPUFriend/HWP but it seems that Intel has improved a thing or two with the 8th gen. On optimal configuration I now get 5000+ single and 15000+ multi core results on GB4.

Feel free to use and amend as required.

 

[mashny]

@the-darkvoid I need your help with optimising the i7-8550U vectors.

I upgraded my motherboard into a i7-8550U w/ 16GB @ 2133Mhz. Surprisingly I can boot without CPUFriend, and it appears that I have most of the P-states as well, which means that XNU power management is working to some extent on 10.14.2.

I'm trying to optimise the CPU power profile now to maximise the performance under the 15W TDP. Not sure if I should use CPUFriend or not, or even Speed-Shift. Have you ever benchmarked the performance using Geekbench or any other tool? Any advice here would be appreciated.

Did you just transplant a motherboard from a 8550u system? If so, could you pass the part #?