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

[bozma88]

my experience:
Model QHD, i7, 16/512gb
No freezes while in clover ((un)plugged the charger several times)
freezes when booting with charger plugged, ever time, even after hibernation
freezes when booting without charger plugged in before the laptop got into hibernation the first time.
No freezer when booting without the charger plugged in and doing a hibernation directliy after loading OSX

I did build my own DSDT, SSDT-NVMe-Pcc.aml and HackNVMEFamily
I partly did the iMessage guide (only the config.plist editing) (partly because I do not have my wifi card yet)
I did not patch the keyboard as I have a German keyboard
I removed the eject.menu file
I do not have my wifi card yet (on its way from china) so I use a TP-Link USB Wifi adapter
My Bios version is 1.3.2 and my options are set as listed in the guide, even the optional ones.

I attached my Clover Hopefully I didn't do anything wrong

Looks good.
Try to reset the EC by unplugging the battery or by other means I am not aware of.
Don't worry, we'll make it!

 

[bozma88]

A message to everyone:
I managed to reformat the NVME drive by enabling 4K sectors.
This will mean three things:

1 - no more need to patch NVME kext! No more Hackrnvmefamily! No more hotpatches!
2 - faster ssd write speed
3 - I'll need your help: we'll have to verify that every SSD shipped with this laptop supports the 4K sector size. If every 9360 NVME configuration will work with 4K sectors, I'll remove all the tedious nvme patches from the guide.

 

[jkbuha]

awesome work @bozma88 - happy to test whatever is required!

 

[jkbuha]

Without USBInjecdtAll.kext, you are getting ACPI configuration of USB ports.
And your SSDT is clearly wrong.
Read USB guide, "Problem Reporting".

You're right (obviously). I overlooked a glaring issue. Needed to enable ports in kext patcher and copy USBInjectAll to system drive (it really doesn't work well when injected by clover). Thanks to this the <device id> has now changed to 9d2f.

I've attached a second attempt at this. It is looking better now with USBInjectAll kext in the system drive...

 

[pspracers]

Looks good.
Try to reset the EC by unplugging the battery or by other means I am not aware of.
Don't worry, we'll make it!

I did it.
Unfortunately I have some more problems now :/
Battery does not get recognised after start up, only after some seconds. (battery symbol with an "X" in the middle)
LAPTOP DOES NOT GO INTO SLEEP ANYMORE??? (with closing the lid)
how could this happen?

EDIT: Battery only got recognised for a short time. I now have the "X"-battery the whole time.
EDIT2: Everything works in Windows

 

[bozma88]

I encountered that battery issue one month ago while experimenting with DSDT patches.
If I remember correctly, it went away after resetting BIOS settings to default (remember to re-patch DVMT and re-set everything as per the guide), deleting nvram.plist from root device and/or root EFI partition, loading an improved DSDT, and rebooting a few times.
What I want to know is whether the charger freeze got fixed or not.

 

[pspracers]

I did the whole DSDT-process again, from dumping a new DSDT with clover an so on. The the issues i got after the EC reset are fixed now. (there were 2 issues i found out later, freeze on brightness keys, and short display light up every 20 secounds or so)

unfortunately, the charging freeze isn't gone. Come on guys, we will get it

 

[R.MnTnA]

A message to everyone:
I managed to reformat the NVME drive by enabling 4K sectors.
This will mean three things:

1 - no more need to patch NVME kext! No more Hackrnvmefamily! No more hotpatches!
2 - faster ssd write speed
3 - I'll need your help: we'll have to verify that every SSD shipped with this laptop supports the 4K sector size. If every 9360 NVME configuration will work with 4K sectors, I'll remove all the tedious nvme patches from the guide.

I thought all SSD drives already used 4k but showed 512 for backwards compatibility. Also did you Align the partition? http://www.minitool.com/lib/4k-alignment.html
And just thinking about that makes me wonder if that could be the cause of the corruption issues that some people were talking about on github.

 

[bozma88]

I thought all SSD drives already used 4k but showed 512 for backwards compatibility. Also did you Align the partition? And just thinking about that, makes me wonder if that could be the cause of the corruption issues that some people were talking about on github.

That's exactly what we are talking about here. Have a read at the latest replies.

My suspect is that the storage driver patch is not complete, some parts are still not patched and are the ones that are called when the system is performing a darkwake on the XPS line. To support this thesis, when Pike was developing the patches, he encountered the same unrecoverable data corruption when the patches were still not finalised.

-> Now I will stay one week with 100% native IOBlockStorage and hibernatemode / darkwakes disabled.
-> Then I'll stay one week with HWP enabled, hibernatemode disabled but maintenance darkwakes still enabled.

I have the feeling that I won't encounter any data corruption.

 

[R.MnTnA]

That's exactly what we are talking about here. Have a read at the latest replies.

My suspect is that the storage driver patch is not complete, some parts are still not patched and are the ones that are called when the system is performing a darkwake on the XPS line. To support this thesis, when Pike was developing the patches, he encountered the same unrecoverable data corruption when the patches were still not finalised.

-> Now I will stay one week with 100% native IOBlockStorage and hibernatemode / darkwakes disabled.
-> Then I'll stay one week with HWP enabled, hibernatemode disabled but maintenance darkwakes still enabled.

I have the feeling that I won't encounter any data corruption.

Ok but I'm not sure if that answered the question....did you do a 4k alignment? Also did you use a special tool for the formatting or Linux gparted or something else?