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

[idotel]

Are you sure about the drive being SATA? I wasn't aware if any version shipping with them.
Anyway, ask yourself if the transition to NVME is worth it for your workload, since current-generation NVME drives draw a lot more power, both in idle and active states.

Some backstory. My Dell XPS 13 QHD touch is a refirb but, at $800USD I thought it was a good deal. Maybe that's why it shipped with a SATA.

Intel 10 Series Chipset:
Vendor: Intel
Product: 10 Series Chipset
Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
Physical Interconnect: SATA
Description: AHCI Version 1.31 Supported
SanDisk X400 M.2 2280 128GB:
Capacity: 128.04 GB (128,035,676,160 bytes)
Model: SanDisk X400 M.2 2280 128GB
Revision: X4130012
Serial Number: 164625425373
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Medium Type: Solid State
TRIM Support: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

 

[cnekol]

Out of interest, I have the same problem on the QHD version and the camera is (VendorID 3141, ProductID 26380)

Maybe different cameras for the FHD & QHD models?

@landmarker
camera it's the same (VendorID 3141, ProductID 26380).
Mine is FHD model.
@bozma88 how about yours?


EDIT: didn't find the attachment. It seems you forget to upload it (the one from 9350).

 

[jkbuha]

Hey @bozma88 thanks for a really good LTS document. I've just bought the XPS 9360 now based solely on reading your topic (I was going for the 9365 2-in-1 but I really don't like the weak m7 processor). Coming from other XPS laptops (my guides are on the *other* mac forums and my bios hacking topics on the bios mods forum) this setup is really a breeze. I've made some modifications to my setup as follows:

My hardware: XPS 9360 w/ i7 7500, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, QHD w/ touchscreen, en-GB keyboard, BIOS 1.3.2 DW1560 card

1) Seeing as I have a larger drive I've kept all the existing partitions to retain the win recovery & ESP partitions, and halved the Win10 partition to accommodate approx ~220MB of Sierra. I've thus installed Clover (v4012) to the main ESP partition and patched all the IFR variables (including the Kaby Lake EWP, overclocking, voltage and XTU parameters, which work brilliantly on Win10 games). That way I can boot automatically into Sierra without impacting the Windows partition, and also make changes to BIOS, EC and ME variables thru Windows. Also BIOS v1.3.2 seems to work quite well, am happy to stay on this for now unless you've seen any specific issues which I should be aware of?

2) I've come across a few niggles which I'm not sure you or anyone else has, specifically:
i) Plugging in or removing the charger cable whilst in OSX freezes the laptop (this does not happen in Windows or any other OS, just Sierra). Not sure if this is a Clover issue or something else I'm missing?
ii) The touchpad is driving me crazy. Truly a worthless piece of junk. Most of the issues I can put up with with, apart from the accidental tap which locks the touchpad into scrolling mode and I cannot un-lock it unless I sleep or reboot the laptop. Is there any way out of this without having to do so?
iii) I've tried to put together a Ukelele layout for the EN-GB keyboards, and failed. The best I've managed to do is use the standard British-laptop keyboards and swapped the '\' and '`' key codes. I'd like to get Ukelele to work though but I'm unsure whether to directly edit the keylayout files or not.
iv) Maybe it's because I'm using the wrong USB charger, but so far I've been unable to charge the laptop with the USB-C cable. I used a heavy-duty Anker 20100 charger in the past (not USB-C, but has an output current of 4.8A so in theory should suffice). If you have any recommended portable chargers that work it would be much appreciated.
v) Looking at your github posts to @syscl regarding deep-idle, I'm not sure I've seen them myself, but then again I'm not sure if I am actually in deep-idle mode. I've installed the X86.. kext and SSDT-pr.aml (the latter I can't seem to disassemble, maybe it's a MacIasl problem) and it seems to work fine. Happy to help you troubleshoot this if you need it.

3) Analysing all the potential Kaby-Lake parameters in the UEFI IFR file we could tweak to improve power and/or performance, there truly is a staggering potential to bring the best out of this laptop. Seeing as this processor is fairly new there are very few guides out there to bring the best out of the kaby procs (and indeed our 9360). I'd like to start putting together a wiki to do so, same as what I've done for the SB chipsets (you can check out my previous work elsewhere). Have you done any optimisations yourself? Happy to work with you to combine effort if you want.

Again, really marvellous work you've done. It feels like just a few tweaks away from a perfect setup that far exceeds the new MacBook Pro 13" in terms of performance (and aesthetics) and I'm truly excited by the potential that future BIOS tweaks can also achieve!

 

[idotel]

Anyone's keyboard change so that the function keys are working as function keys by default as supposed to mute, volume, FF, Rew, Pause, etc...

Seems I can't change the functions settings from SysytemPrefereces>Keyboard.

 

[einz]

hey all, sorry for the newbie question - in the files-v8.zip file, what is the difference between EFI and EFI-BASIC-INSTALL folders?

 

[bozma88]

hey all, sorry for the newbie question - in the files-v8.zip file, what is the difference between EFI and EFI-BASIC-INSTALL folders?

EFI BASIC contains the bare minimum for booting the installer. You have to put it on USB key to boot the installer.
EFI is the fully working config you have to install in the internal EFI partition after successfully installing the OS.

 

[bozma88]

Anyone's keyboard change so that the function keys are working as function keys by default as supposed to mute, volume, FF, Rew, Pause, etc...

Seems I can't change the functions settings from SysytemPrefereces>Keyboard.

BIOS setting

 

[bozma88]

Hey @bozma88 thanks for a really good LTS document. I've just bought the XPS 9360 now based solely on reading your topic (I was going for the 9365 2-in-1 but I really don't like the weak m7 processor). Coming from other XPS laptops (my guides are on the *other* mac forums and my bios hacking topics on the bios mods forum) this setup is really a breeze. I've made some modifications to my setup as follows:

My hardware: XPS 9360 w/ i7 7500, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, QHD w/ touchscreen, en-GB keyboard, BIOS 1.3.2 DW1560 card

You're welcome! I have updated to 1.3.2 too, and that seems the preferred BIOS at the moment because it corrects the AHCI bug with 3rd party SSDs.

1) Seeing as I have a larger drive I've kept all the existing partitions to retain the win recovery & ESP partitions, and halved the Win10 partition to accommodate approx ~220MB of Sierra. I've thus installed Clover (v4012) to the main ESP partition and patched all the IFR variables (including the Kaby Lake EWP, overclocking, voltage and XTU parameters, which work brilliantly on Win10 games). That way I can boot automatically into Sierra without impacting the Windows partition, and also make changes to BIOS, EC and ME variables thru Windows. Also BIOS v1.3.2 seems to work quite well, am happy to stay on this for now unless you've seen any specific issues which I should be aware of?

Please share all that you can on this topic (IFR variables you edit, Windows patching, recovery from wrong settings), which I find of great interest, especially for settings related to energy savings (ASPM, undervolt).

2) I've come across a few niggles which I'm not sure you or anyone else has, specifically:
i) Plugging in or removing the charger cable whilst in OSX freezes the laptop (this does not happen in Windows or any other OS, just Sierra). Not sure if this is a Clover issue or something else I'm missing?

What charger? I tried with OEM one and with USB-C, no hangs, perfectly recognised.

ii) The touchpad is driving me crazy. Truly a worthless piece of junk. Most of the issues I can put up with with, apart from the accidental tap which locks the touchpad into scrolling mode and I cannot un-lock it unless I sleep or reboot the laptop. Is there any way out of this without having to do so?

Absolutely no hangs for me. Never happened. Are you using my voodoops2 kext? It's a hybrid between Rehabman's and syscl ones. With this kext the pad is behaving better than in Windows.

iii) I've tried to put together a Ukelele layout for the EN-GB keyboards, and failed. The best I've managed to do is use the standard British-laptop keyboards and swapped the '\' and '`' key codes. I'd like to get Ukelele to work though but I'm unsure whether to directly edit the keylayout files or not.

I attached you a Ukelele guide. It's trivial.

iv) Maybe it's because I'm using the wrong USB charger, but so far I've been unable to charge the laptop with the USB-C cable. I used a heavy-duty Anker 20100 charger in the past (not USB-C, but has an output current of 4.8A so in theory should suffice). If you have any recommended portable chargers that work it would be much appreciated.

Read carefully the main thread, everything about USB-PD profiles is explained, you'll understand that you need a charger that syndicates a 20V 1.5A profile or greater. As of today, most of them are dangerous because they syndicate a higher current during the handshake. Mine is from UGREEN, ~15 USD. You also need a thick USB-C cable made for power-delivery. Aukey makes good ones, 5 USD, 2 meters.

v) Looking at your github posts to @syscl regarding deep-idle, I'm not sure I've seen them myself, but then again I'm not sure if I am actually in deep-idle mode. I've installed the X86.. kext and SSDT-pr.aml (the latter I can't seem to disassemble, maybe it's a MacIasl problem) and it seems to work fine. Happy to help you troubleshoot this if you need it.

I strongly advise to stay away from HWP and deep idle settings untile better understood, if you use your machine as your main rig.
v8-files archive is totally safe in terms of sleep, data corruption, coil whine.
CPU+GPU PM is not native but works beautifully even WITHOUT ssdtprgen, only vanilla SSDTs tables. Look at the first posts of this thread for proof. I am experimenting with HWP, and I already encountered data corruption, laptop started coil whining and I almost understood how to solve them, but I won't publish any update until 100% sure. With deep-idle and HWP I was able to squeeze 10-20% more battery life, but at the momento it's not worth it. Follow the syscl github issues but for now my advice is to stay with my exact v8 configuration (that doesn't include ssdtprgen SSDT table, by the way).

3) Analysing all the potential Kaby-Lake parameters in the UEFI IFR file we could tweak to improve power and/or performance, there truly is a staggering potential to bring the best out of this laptop. Seeing as this processor is fairly new there are very few guides out there to bring the best out of the kaby procs (and indeed our 9360). I'd like to start putting together a wiki to do so, same as what I've done for the SB chipsets (you can check out my previous work elsewhere). Have you done any optimisations yourself? Happy to work with you to combine effort if you want.

It would be greatly appreciated (and credited).

Again, really marvellous work you've done. It feels like just a few tweaks away from a perfect setup that far exceeds the new MacBook Pro 13" in terms of performance (and aesthetics) and I'm truly excited by the potential that future BIOS tweaks can also achieve!

Glad you appreciate. The guide will soon be reformatted and many other tidbits I discovered during this month will be added.

Waiting for your contributions, then!

 

[idotel]

@bozma88 I find it pretty difficult to keep my 9360 working consistently. The problems stem from audio drivers I think. Sometimes they cause the kernel to shoot up %400 CPU usage. Other times the audio stops working on reboot and I usually invalidate and rebuild the kext files and reboot again.

Got any advice for me? I'm trying to figure it out on my own but, I haven't yet.

 

[jkbuha]

Sure thing. First off, here is a list of IFR variables I've changed:

1) Speed Shift -> 1
2) RTH -> 1
3) HDC Control -> 1
4) CPU VR Settings (PL1, PL2) -> 1
5) Power Limit 4 Override + Lock -> 1
6) Energy Performance Gain -> 1 <- don't really know what this does but the name was too tempting...
7) Overclocking ->
8) WDT -> 1
9) XTU Interface -> 1
10) IMON Scaling -> 1
11) Vboost Enable
12) RSR -> 1
13) BCLK Aware adaptable Voltage -> 1
14) Core Voltage Mode -> Adaptable

That's all I've done for now in case I bricked the machine by mistake. Ideally we'd be able to unlock the actual menus themselves in the bios to save me from having to boot into text mode and faff with setup_var, just like the crack I did for the XPS 15z.

What I haven't done yet is scientifically baselined the performance gain, but the frame rates are definitely better in Windows.

Let me know your mileage!

(Caution - these settings worked on my laptop, which is almost identical to yours, but still, make sure you know how to boot into UEFI recovery mode and reflash/reset your BIOS if necessary!)