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[GUIDE] Installing 3rd Party Kexts - El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina

Yeah, that's my point as well.
Much easier to update them or fix issues if any.
There's a utility called "kext updater" from update.kextupdater.de which can scan "/clover/others".
I use it checking kext updates and it works really well, keeps my kext latest!

I really liked that app Kext Updater, but I had to remove it because it contains:
Adware.OSX.Pirrit-1
If at some point in the future the adware is removed, I'll gladly use it again.
 
I really liked that app Kext Updater, but I had to remove it because it contains: Adware.OSX.Pirrit-1 If at some point in the future the adware is removed, I'll gladly use it again.


@jiffyslot,

The best tool to install Kexts into /L/E is now Hackingtool, it basically does what using Kext Beast + Kext Utility does but in a single App with a single mouse click, Chapter-7 of the Guide in Post #1 updated to show this new and easy method.

Cheers
Jay
 
Thank you for writing this up jaymonkey. It's very insightful.

When I followed the advice of this thread initially, my computer, which was working fine before, refused to boot fully -- even in single user mode. I took it to verbose mode, and found out that there was an issue loading some kexts.

I booted into recovery mode from the Clover menu (thank goodness that worked), mounted my EFI partition, and navigated to the /Volumes/HDD/Library/Extensions folder in two separate terminals, listing the directories of each.

I proceeded to delete every kext I copied from the EFI folder to the /Library/Extensions folder. Rebooted, and the system came back to life. I could've left it there, but knowing that I was doing things incorrectly didn't sit well with me.

Obviously, I had a bunch of kexts that were wrong for my system and/or causing conflicts, so I needed to do some house-cleaning.

I wound up removing all of these kexts from my EFI folder (safely putting them in the root directory of EFI to recover them quickly if I needed to). Before I removed these kexts, I looked them up to refresh my memory on what they were for:
- ALXEthernet.kext
- AppleIntelE1000e.kext
- BrcmFirmwareData.kext
- BrcmNonPatchRAM2.kext
- BrcmPatchRAM2.kext
- lspcidrv.kext
- Patched_10.7_AppleRTC.kext
- RealtekRTL8111.kext
- VoodooPS2Controller.kext

At some point or another, I had convinced myself I needed those kexts - the Brcm ones being related to another issue I've been having with my Magic Mouse 2 intermittently losing its connection. I'm now hopeful that that issue will be resolved by your pro tip guide to extend my antennas that UtterDisbelief pointed me to.

Once I cleaned house, I copied the remaining kexts from /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other to /Library/Extensions using Hackintool:
- AirportBrcmFixup.kext
- AppleALC.kext
- FakeSMC.kext
- Lilu.kext
- USBInjectAll.kext
- WhateverGreen.kext

Once that was done, I removed all kexts except for FakeSMC.kext from the /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other folder.

Rebooted, and everything works as it did before. I feel like I have a better understanding of why these kexts are appropriately placed now, I've cleaned up kexts that were not relevant to my configuration and could potentially cause problems, and was introduced to a pretty nice tool in Hackintool.

Thanks again jaymonkey - this is a huge help for me.

Hopefully, if someone else runs into a brick wall because they've loaded their system up with a whole bunch of kexts that they don't need, this gives them some direction. Less is more.

Edited to add: apparently, going through this process fixed a long-standing issue I've had with my computer saying it's "been restarted because of a problem". Amazing.
 
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One question that I have: how do I know which of my kexts are critical?

Obviously, AppleALC is not critical. I can also get by without USBInjectAll, even though it's not ideal.

Are Lilu and WhateverGreen "critical"? I wouldn't think so, but want to be sure.
 
One question that I have: how do I know which of my kexts are critical?


@remanifest,

As the guide states the only really critical kext to have in /EFI/Clover/Kexts/ is FakeSMC which is required to run MacOS Installer, Update and Recovery. Most systems wont need Lilu + WhatEverGreen as Installer, Update and Recovery use the VESA drivers .. however this may not be true for all systems it mostly depends on your default display connection and if it requires any special framebuffer patching. USBInjectALL may be required if you need to access certain USB ports in recovery .. but again it depends on which ports.

Some users have a network driver so that they can access a Timemachine backup form a LAN Server

I only have FakeSMC in /EFI/Clover/Kexts/ on all my Hacks and have no problems.

Cheers
Jay
 
To update Lilu, etc., I downloaded the files; however, they are zip files. Do I simply rename the .zip to .kext? Or is the kext file hidden somewhere in the zip file? Thanks.
 
To update Lilu, etc., I downloaded the files; however, they are zip files. Do I simply rename the .zip to .kext? Or is the kext file hidden somewhere in the zip file? Thanks.
You appear to have downloaded the source rather than the precompiled kexts.
Click the Download link at the top of the page - Then kexts - Then the kext that you want.
On the resource page click the Download link on the top right not the the link to the source.
 
To update Lilu, etc., I downloaded the files; however, they are zip files. Do I simply rename the .zip to .kext? Or is the kext file hidden somewhere in the zip file? Thanks.


@legaleye3000,

If you want to download directly from the GitHub repos then click on the "Releases" option and then download the latest release version and then unzip for example if you want the latest version of Lilu first goto the projects github repo and then click on the "releases tab :-

Screenshot 2019-05-29 at 12.23.31.png .

And then download the version you want :-

Screenshot 2019-05-29 at 12.24.29.png

Once the file is downloaded unzip it and install the extracted kext into /L/E.

Cheers
Jay
 
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