[Guide] Dell XPS 9560 Mojave VirtualSMC, I2C Trackpad, Clover UEFI Hotpatch

[iHac2theMacs]

Updating my BIOS alleviated issues. back in business. Will be more vigilant on this from now on.

 

[rekoil]

Has anyone attempted to boot this laptop using OpenCore? I tried and got stuck at OC: OcAppleGenericInputTimerQuirkExit status - Success (followed by ~210 kb of null byte characters in the log, stripped in the uploaded version). I've tried the suggestions in the OpenCore Vanilla Desktop Guide, but none help. I've disabled CFG Lock in BIOS, and I've also tried with the hacks around it, but it just won't work. Any suggestions?

 

[Fusions]

Just wanted to say huge THANK YOU! Another Dell Precision 5520 happy camper! ️

Hmm, I also have a Dell Precision 5520 and I could not for the life of me get this working when I tried to install Mojave on my SSD. Is there any way you could help me out? The common problem I was running into was an intermittent shutdown for no reason when I went to install macOS on my drive. Im not sure what is causing it because even in verbose mode, nothing shows up and the system instantly just powers down. It's very strange. I tried multiple usb drives as well and it always ends up the same with the random shutdown during the initial usb install to the SSD. Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

EDIT: This definitely seems to be an issue with APFS somewhere. I took a picture of the install logs before it shuts down.

EDIT2: Realized that I have a PM981 not a PM961. Just bought a PM961 off Amazon and hopefully that works out!

 

[dmitry_matora]

Finally got myself tb16 dock
Hotplug works for DisplayPort and Power delivery

Internal ethernet autodetects network as 100Mbit instead of 1Gbit, manual 1Gbit works thought but I use USB3 ethernet adapter plugged into tb16 instead.

USB2 doesn't work whatever I do and sadly USB3 hotplug works for only for removing and adding devices to dock, but each time I plug laptop into the dock, I have to restart to get ethernet working, which kinda makes dock nearly useless.

 

[LeLunZ]

Has anyone attempted to boot this laptop using OpenCore? I tried and got stuck at OC: OcAppleGenericInputTimerQuirkExit status - Success (followed by ~210 kb of null byte characters in the log, stripped in the uploaded version). I've tried the suggestions in the OpenCore Vanilla Desktop Guide, but none help. I've disabled CFG Lock in BIOS, and I've also tried with the hacks around it, but it just won't work. Any suggestions?

I have tried it and it did work. But I used one of the first open core versions.
The file which I attached includes 4 Versions which I tried. Don't know if one of it is the working one. I think I worked on the boot partition and these are just tries (which not work, but with a few changes they could)

I don't know much about opencore, and I just followed the beta and the documentation

 

[Benni]

Just an update - Catalina seems to be a safe upgrade now.

I upgraded before but had issues, where the touchpad would often work but only via the legacy driver - which meant no 3 finger gestures. Scrolling worked with 2 fingers. Restarting multiple times fixed the issue temporarily but it was not a good experience. Probably 50% of the time the I2C touchpad kext would not be loaded correctly. As a result, I reinstalled Mojave and stuck with that ever since. I tried again last week and had a smooth upgrade experience: download the Catalina installer and run it!

A couple of observations:

1. The OS separates the system files into their own partition but it's easy to mount it. I would recommend Hackintool - as it allows you to both mount the system partition and rebuild the kext cache if needed. This is the main thing that put me off upgrading but actually it's been fine.

2. Filevault seems to be fine. Worked in Mojave and works in Cat just as well.

3. You must use APFS. With Mojave it was possible to initially install to an APFS drive and then clone that installation back to a drive formatted as HFS+ but this does not seem to be possible anymore. If you use APFS already then this won't be a concern for you. If there's a work-around please let me know so others can benefit

My Mojave install was on a drive formatted with HFS+ . My upgrade path was:
a) Format an external drive as APFS.
b) Use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable backup of my Mojave install to the external, APFS drive. Run the clover installer to the external drive to make it bootable and copy the EFI folder to it.
c) Boot the cloned Mojave install from the external APFS drive.
d) Upgrade the Mojave install to Catalina via the 'Install Catalina' app (Check out Dosdude's patcher if you need a Catalina install image) on the external drive.
e) Boot the newly-upgraded Catalina install from the external drive.
f) Use disk utility to wipe the internal drive in my XPS and reformat as APFS.
g) Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external drive to the newly-formatted internal drive.
h) Install clover and copy the EFI folder over.

You could possibly do a Time Machine backup, freshly install Catalina and then restore but I have not tried this myself.

4. Make sure that you use both the Kextupdater app and manually check the kext versions online - in particular the updates to the I2C touchpad kext seems to have greatly improved Catalina stability. As far as I am aware, you will need a forked version of BrcmPatchRAM. If this is not the case anymore please let me know. I have the forked KEXTS and they work fine for me: https://github.com/acidanthera/BrcmPatchRAM/releases

I used the following patchram kexts: BrcmFirmwareData.kext, BrcmBluetoothInjector.kext and BrcmPatchRAM3.kext and this works fine. In Mojave I used BrcmPatchRAM2 and it still works in Catalina... But BrcmPatchRAM3 is apparently designed for Catalina. I haven't noticed any issues in upgrading to the BrcmPatchRAM3 kext, so I don't see a compelling reason not to change.

For reference I use the DW1830 WiFi card and with the above Bluetooth kexts. I don't see why the DW1560 would not also work equally as well.

________________

Everything works just as well as it did in Mojave. 32 bit apps are no longer supported but that's a Catalina issue that cannot be avoided and effects everyone. Only 1 app I use does not have a 64bit version but it is fairly resource-light and runs OK from a virtual machine.

Sorry for the wall of text - feel free to ask questions or point out any mistakes with what I wrote above so that I can make corrections.

Wishing you all a great week,
Benni.

 

[dmitry_matora]

Got myself Belkin TB3 Express Dock HD Apple is selling for MacBooks for $299.95



And it works great, except that ... it doesn't charge my XPS! Got it on ebay for $110 so it might be a faulty unit, but
I'm not gonna buy another one just to see if that's the case. While testing it, I've noticed that it doesn't have any problem with USB2 devices, which brought me to idea.

I've switched back to TB16, and plugged my Anker USB-C to 3-Port USB 3.0 Hub with Ethernet Adapter (got it on eBay for $16) into TB16 USB-C port and TADA! USB2.0 devices finally work fine, plus Ethernet autodetects 1Gbit without an issue and I can plug all devices into my XPS with just one cable!

Still have to reboot each time I plug into the dock, hopefully that will be solved one day. But since I'm only using laptop to browse and screen share my desktop, rebooting laptop doesn't cause that much trouble.

 

[xKlokwerkz]

Following Benni's post, I dirty upgraded to Catalina 10.15.4.

Filevault and Bluetooth seems to be working however I'm still tinkering with WiFi with a DW1560. It seems to be a bit spotty for a few minutes then works fine. I'm also failing to connect to my Personal Hotspot on my iPhone it seems.

Overall Catalina is running perfectly with all iServices working as intended with the exception of streaming a video using appleTV. DRM issue is what I recall as another user suggested as well.

Thank you all.

 

[ChielB]

Just a quick heads up, I couldn’t install the 10.15.4 update. Turns out I had to update clover. Then, once the update had installed, I couldn’t boot into Mac OS anymore. I had to update whatevergreen and lilu via mounting the efi partition in windows. I recommend updating these kexts before updating to 10.15.4

 

[ganeshka]

Greetings I first of all I would like to say THANK YOU for this amazing guide and opportunity to use my laptop in new way everything is perfect . Waiting for my BCM94360NG and I think this will be perfect laptop for my needs. One big question , what is your average battery life ? Im getting around 4:30 + hours , brightness around 75% , using Vscode for web development and live server on chrome , plus xcode virtual device iPhone xs max for testing . Can you share your results please.​