To address these 3 at once - This is my Hackintosh. zip file attached
Comparing Hackintosh Thunderbolt to Hackintosh PCI, they are basically the same. They both use a pci1b21,1080 which is a "ASM1083/1085 PCIe to PCI Bridge" (PCIe 1.0 250 MB/s). The bridge connects the two PCI devices pci1412,1724@0 and pci1412,1712@1. I had previously mistakenly called them functions but they are devices - they have different device numbers for their PCI addresses. The PCI devices run at 33.33 MHz 32 bit (133 MB/s).
I see two differences:
1) "L0s Exit Latency" (I don't know what that is) for the ASM108x bridge connected to Thunderbolt (in the range of [1,2)µs) is four times greater than when connected to PCI (in the range of [256,512)ns)
2) The Thunderbolt implementation has an extra interrupt bit in the IOInterruptSpecifiers of the ASM108x bridge.
Included in the new zip file (with VRS8 attached this time
). new zip file attached to this post has everything you asked for.
For MacBook Pro, I now see the VRS8 devices and drivers attached to pci1412,1724@0. You can find the three Thunderbolt "IOPCITunnelled" and "Thunderbolt Path" and "Depth" properties I mentioned in the ioreg output.
Yes, Steven Slate is adamant about that and is all over social media saying that they're close. Don't ask me how they're pulling it off (maybe they're using a DP type of a protocol to push signal from unit to unit - IDK), but the main idea is that the PC (or old cheese grater Mac) guys, as Steven says in the video, would hook it up using HDMI/PCIe and then chain up to 6 of them together using the built in TH2 ports. See attached image of the chip. I
googled it and found
this.
I still don't see how. The chip PI2EQX4401D (glad you found it - I was looking for P12 instead of PI2) is a PCIe 1x redriver which means it's just sending the PCIe signal across the HDMI cable (an HDMI 1.3 cable at 3.4
Gbit/s per line is good enough for PCIe 1.0 2.5 GT/s) . There must be a switch in the VRS8 that moves the connection of the ASM108x bridge from the Thunderbolt controller to the HDMI input. I don't see a method for daisy chaining in that case unless they have a third connection type that connects a Thunderbolt controller to the HDMI input as upstream and the remaining PCIe lanes of the Thunderbolt controller as downstream but every Thunderbolt controller I've seen used their PCIe lanes for upstream only (as host) or downstream only (for peripheral). Plus they would have to make the Thunderbolt controller work as a host connected to a Mac Pro that doesn't support Thunderbolt (except for the limited GC-TITAN RIDGE case where macOS is warmbooted from Windows which enables connecting Thunderbolt devices). Every VRS8 needs to appear as a PCI device, so they all need a PCIe bridge (as provided by the Thunderbolt controllers).
Yes, the VRS8PanelHelper, I think that's just the front end GUI that's supposed to light up when the device is detected. Take a look at the screenshot differences between the grayed out (Hackintosh) and the lit up (MacBookPro). Ok, this right there - it sounds like the VRS8 driver is merely designed to establish a connection to the Core Audio system, and acts as a blue print for the externally connected VRS8, correct?
I don't know enough about the audio drivers to know how it should look.
But it is Core Audio that takes over and does the rest as far as audio processing is concerned. I know I'm dumbing it down a lot but is that the general idea? Before you think: "why does any of this matter?" I just want to establish which driver is responsible for doing what to help me better understand how this all comes together.I also have a Behringer U-PHORIA UMC404HD (a USB audio interface) which doesn't even need the driver for some reason (with real mac or a Hackintosh) but it is automatically detected and both output AND input work perfectly. In fact I'm having to run this one for sound/watching Youtube, etc. while working on this TH issue.
USB is easy. USB comes with USB class drivers to handle standard types of USB devices. Common classes are Audio, Video, Mass Storage, HID. There just needs to be a single driver per class to handle all USB devices of the same class.
One more crazy idea - both Mac Pro (trash can) and the MacBookPro have built in TH2 connections. Obviously my Hackintosh does not. Is there a possibility that the Apple's TH3>TH2 adapter is the culprit here? I doubt it, since other people on this and other threads have same issues with Presonus and Slate, but not with Focusrite or UAD Apollos, but who knows.
I doubt it. Find a 2017+ Mac with Thunderbolt 3 and try it out. I think the problem is your Hackintosh's Thunderbolt doesn't look like a real Mac's Thunderbolt. I don't know if
@kgp's SSDT's can fix that.
One question. You have the PCIe to HDMI card. The card works in Windows but not macOS? Because there's a driver for Windows but not macOS? I think if you had the driver for macOS, then it would work with the VRS8 that is connected via Thunderbolt since all the PCI devices are the same as when connected by PCI. Can you get the macOS PCI beta driver? If it doesn't work for the Hackintosh Thunderbolt case, then you should talk to Slate about fixing the driver.
If we can't make Thunderbolt on Hackintosh look like Thunderbolt on a Mac, and you can't get a macOS PCI beta driver, then you have to patch the Thunderbolt driver so that it doesn't care about Thunderbolt. Start disassembling using Hopper.app. Then create a Lilu extension to do the required patches.
Another option is to fake some Thunderbolt nodes - like the ones that exist in the MacBook Pro. This might work if the driver only cares about the properties in the IORegistry, and not the classes. Maybe a codeless kext is enough to do that. You would want to include these (attached to IOThunderboltController):
Code:
| | +-o IOThunderboltPort@5
| | +-o IOThunderboltSwitchType2
| | +-o IOThunderboltPort@1
| | +-o IOThunderboltPort@3
| | +-o IOThunderboltSwitchType2
You would also need to setup the "Thunderbolt Path" properties. This is doable for one VRS8. It's slightly more complicated for more than 1.
