Running High Sierra with O.C.

[Middleman]

@Middleman,
Thanks for replying. Yes, that's one of the things I had to do... among many others. All works now, but I'm not sure there is any advantage of OpenCore 0.7.0 over Clover 5119 for booting my Gigabyte Z370N-WIFI system on High Sierra. Hours of problems with a net result of slower booting and that complex EFI folder. I have sea stories, but not worth using bandwidth since it finally works.

The advantage with Opencore is that it does seem to have far better memory and device management with macOS than Clover. With Clover despite it being seemingly simple to configure, the biggest problems were often memory and how it was managed. You didn't know whether to use Emuvariable64-UEFI or OSXAptioMemoryFix or any of its variants like OSXAptioFix3 or OSXAptioFix2-free2000, and then you had the SMBIOS issues on top. Now that I'm more familiar with Opencore, I see it took a lot more work and refining with Clover. That's not to say Clover is 'dead' so to speak - development is still ongoing for it and in fact it has now been updated for Monterey from what I heard recently.

As it goes Clover can boot on Z490 Comet Lake with Catalina, but with the working configurations I've seen they are totally different compared to what a typical Z390 Clover setup looks like. Check this out (for example):

vs

Quite a difference, yes?

 

[wstrohm]

I can see the differences, but am not knowledgeable enough to know how to interpret them. In my case, I note that during the Apple progress bar sequence, i.e. after OC has done its "thing," there are more "speed bumps" between opening the progress bar and bringing up the Finder display than when using Clover 5119. In fact, I am wondering if there are changes I could make in OC that would improve the speed of the progress bar. For instance, there are options specified in Dortania's "Coffeelake" guide which favor the "debug" installation, but no recommendations for the "release" version, which I use. There are also differences between the 0.7.0 Sample Plist and the online "quirks" for various sections, some of which just don't track. One has to make choices, but even the "more in depth" spoilers don't help much for the latest version. I attached my "successful" High Sierra config.plist here, but for me at least, questions remain:

1. In Device Properties/Add/alc-layout-id, the provided argument is "01000000" which is 4 bytes. But the online guide page for the Realtek ALC1220 states the correct code is either "0x100001" or "0x100003." Those are 3-byte hex numbers, and I have no idea how to write a 4-byte number in the argument that matches the 3-byte number. Besides which, the "01000000" gives me sound, so what's happening there?

2. In Misc/Boot, "Launcher Option's" default is Disabled, and "LauncherPath" is Default. But neither of these items is present in the guide, either in the screenshot or in any of the relevant text. The guide says to leave Boot alone, so I did, and it works. But what are those parameters doing?

I had 7 items written out here and something deleted them all... oh well, that was very much like trying to boot on OC 0.7.0. I'll stop here instead!

 

[Edhawk]

Did you run the ClearNvram tool between switching OC folders? This is usually necessary when making changes to the config.plist or updating/downgrading the OC version.

 

[wstrohm]

All works okay now; no problems with Z370N-WIFI Mobo running 10.13.6 using OC 0.7.0, as long as all the nVidia WebDriver-installed kexts are in the SSD's /Library. If those kexts are in EFI/OC/kexts/Other and not in /Library, only the MacOS Default driver will be active. (No graphics acceleration on the nVidia 1050 Ti OC card.)