OSX freeze after installing official nVidia Fermi drivers

[mbg032373]

Well, it took a bit over 8 hours for it to KP, so at least it is better then the 2-3 per hour before the BIOS adjustment, but it isn't 100%. Here is the KP.

 

[edwardo]

I'm happy to report that after much trial and error (mostly error), I now appear to have a workable, stable GTS 450.

Stable, doesn't crash (yet) and (important to me) sleep works fine.

I'm using standard tonymacx86 install package & Nvidia drivers. I used GPU-Z in Windows 7 to generate a ROM file (10de_0dc4.ROM), and changed my com.apple.Boot.plist to include:

<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>UseNvidiaROM</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>VBIOS</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Wow, that's amazing! I like the idea of reverse engineering the graphic card's ROM and using that in the Mac setup for the graphic card. It's brilliant!

cheers

 

[hawgguy]

Still running nice & stable with the GTS 450.

Riddle me this:

Cinebench 11.5

Win 7
CPU 5.12
GPU 44.70

OSX
CPU 5.52
GPU 27.42

Why the 60% performance hit with OSX? Is it solely the level of maturity of the Nvidia drivers? At this point I'm satisfied to be rid of the KPs.

 

[tonymacx86]

Still running nice & stable with the GTS 450.

Riddle me this:

Cinebench 11.5

Win 7
CPU 5.12
GPU 44.70

OSX
CPU 5.52
GPU 27.42

Why the 60% performance hit with OSX? Is it solely the level of maturity of the Nvidia drivers? At this point I'm satisfied to be rid of the KPs.

Did you change anything (clock/freq) in the .rom file with an editor? Or is it the stock bios from gpu-z?

 

[shaithis]

I'm happy to report that after much trial and error (mostly error), I now appear to have a workable, stable GTS 450.

Stable, doesn't crash (yet) and (important to me) sleep works fine.

I'm using standard tonymacx86 install package & Nvidia drivers. I used GPU-Z in Windows 7 to generate a ROM file (10de_0dc4.ROM), and changed my com.apple.Boot.plist to include:

<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>UseNvidiaROM</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>VBIOS</key>
<string>Yes</string>

I am fairly sure this is going to work for the 580 as well. There's a show-stopping limitation in chameleon I just noticed that has been hampering my attempts though (64k nvidia rom size limitation which truncates!)

 

[mbg032373]

Here is another KP for you.

BIOS edit starting to not look so hot now.

 

[boardmember]

hawgguy, well at least you're getting what I consider good benchmarks... I get 3.5 fps in Cinebench. I'd be totally happy with ~30 fps. I'm wondering what's different between our macines, as we have the same graphics chipset and similar mobo's.

About the KP's, they are all in different places. The first one posted was actually a purposeful one in the driver... it does a sanity check on itself, and if it fails that or the read at 0x0061002C is -1, then it intentionally calls panic().

The ones from mbg are infinitely harder to debug even though they contain more information (IDA Pro's decompiler does not work on 64-bit binaries, and that decompiler simplifies my job significantly). But the first one is a crash in the GeForce.kext, while the second is in NVDAResman.kext. I'm still looking into what exactly is causing it. I can't help it, I have a curious mind

My next goal is to find out what is being read... I'm wondering if it's the BIOS...

 

[tonymacx86]

New KP screen- extra screen stuff removed:

 

[hawgguy]

Did you change anything (clock/freq) in the .rom file with an editor? Or is it the stock bios from gpu-z?

Stock bios from gpu-z.

 

[hawgguy]

hawgguy, well at least you're getting what I consider good benchmarks... I get 3.5 fps in Cinebench. I'd be totally happy with ~30 fps. I'm wondering what's different between our macines, as we have the same graphics chipset and similar mobo's.

It almost sounds as if you are not loading the proper nvidia drivers with scores that low.

Try the -v boot flag and see which nvidia drivers are loaded.