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

[bozma88]

Look-what-I-just-found:

BIOS-enabled and sleep-persistent HWP on the way?

 

[RehabMan]

Look-what-I-just-found:

View attachment 233093

BIOS-enabled and sleep-persistent HWP on the way?

Worth a try ... hopefully doesn't create a brick.

 

[zTechnique]

Guide looks great! I will be getting a supported wireless chip today in the mail and once I get it installed, I plan on trying to follow this guide and get it running in my machine. This is my first time trying a hackintosh so I will likely run into issues.

 

[bozma88]

Worth a try ... hopefully doesn't create a brick.

No brick but no luck. Now SST is enabled in BIOS but in OSX is shows as disabled.
As I found out, some pioneers with XPS 9350 and Windows did this with satisfying results.

Tomorrow I'll boot into Windows to check if it is enabled there...

Guide looks great! I will be getting a supported wireless chip today in the mail and once I get it installed, I plan on trying to follow this guide and get it running in my machine. This is my first time trying a hackintosh so I will likely run into issues.

Welcome on board! Be careful and read all the FAQs and generic guides you can, my wish is to keep this thread more R&D-oriented, as the forum is full of threads that focus on solving a specific problem.

 

[RehabMan]

View attachment 233118

No brick but no luck. Now SST is enabled in BIOS but in OSX is shows as disabled.
As I found out, some pioneers with XPS 9350 and Windows did this with satisfying results.

Tomorrow I'll boot into Windows to check if it is enabled there...

I wonder if macOS disables it during the boot process.

 

[bozma88]

I wonder if macOS disables it during the boot process.

From what I understood, the only way to disable Speed Shift is by halting the processor or putting it in a very low power state.

So there are 3 possibilities:
1 - BIOS switch is not functional or requires setting other variables that I ignore
2 - During MacOS boot the CPU gets initialised in a way that doesn't preserve HWP
3 - MacOS explicitly disables HPW because doesn't find a recognised CPU (it's a faked SKL, reported as Xeon on MacOS System report) or some other files (frequency vectors/Energy Preferred profile)?

I think I'll eliminate 2 by... putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up.
___
Still no HWP after wake up. I'll report what happens with Windows, just to be sure the BIOS hidden switch is working.

 

[RehabMan]

From what I understood, the only way to disable Speed Shift is by halting the processor or putting it in a very low power state.

So there are 3 possibilities:
1 - BIOS switch is not functional or requires setting other variables that I ignore
2 - During MacOS boot the CPU gets initialised in a way that doesn't preserve HWP
3 - MacOS explicitly disables HPW because doesn't find a recognised CPU (it's a faked SKL, reported as Xeon on MacOS System report) or some other files (frequency vectors/Energy Preferred profile)?

I think I'll eliminate 2 by... putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up.

I had assumed that you verified BIOS was actually setting it (eg. via Linux or something).

 

[zTechnique]

Okay, so I've been reading up DVMT patching and I'm still a bit confused on how to do it exactly for this laptop. I was wondering if you can shed some light on this for me, via this thread or a PM? New to this, I'd like to know I'm at least shootin' in the right direction here. I do understand that you or anybody who replies is not responsible for anything that happens to my machine.

The file I pulled from my bios backup is attached to this thread and I believe it is the correct one to change the pre-allocation memory to 64mb.

After searching DVMT, I found "Setting: DVMT Pre-Allocated, Variable: 0x785"... to change that to be 64mb, I change it to read this? "Setting: DVMT Pre-Allocated, Variable: 0x785 0x2"

Thanks for any help you guys provide.

 

[bozma88]

Okay, so I've been reading up DVMT patching and I'm still a bit confused on how to do it exactly for this laptop. I was wondering if you can shed some light on this for me, via this thread or a PM? New to this, I'd like to know I'm at least shootin' in the right direction here. I do understand that you or anybody who replies is not responsible for anything that happens to my machine.

The file I pulled from my bios backup is attached to this thread and I believe it is the correct one to change the pre-allocation memory to 64mb.

After searching DVMT, I found "Setting: DVMT Pre-Allocated, Variable: 0x785"... to change that to be 64mb, I change it to read this? "Setting: DVMT Pre-Allocated, Variable: 0x785 0x2"

Thanks for any help you guys provide.

The variable you identified should be correct for bios 1.2.3.
Now you need a special efi shell (included in the files package) to write the value (setup_var 0x785 0x2). Good luck.

 

[bozma88]

I had assumed that you verified BIOS was actually setting it (eg. via Linux or something).

It seems that exposing speedshift via BIOS is not as simple as we thought.
After some research, it seems that a properly configured bios with SST enabled should expose device CPPC (ACPI 5 spec) to let the system enable HWP by askig CPPC to do it. That's the way Windows enables HWP at boot.

Time to do another ACPI dump...