Which kexts for an X9SRL-F / Xeon E5 2665 / 128GB / c602 chipset?

[borisnet]

Hi all,

Just to bore you with a bit of context, I have a FreeBSD running as a multi-purpose NAS, VirtualBox, jails, etc...
It's running on a Supermicro X9SRL-F with an XEON E5 2665 and 128GB of RAM which gives plenty of comfort to ZFS. I use 3 M1015 controllers for 18 HDD. Having looked at recent motherboard and thinking about building a more powerful hackintosh, I looked in more details at which components to use.
With the recent options of mobo like this one:
http://www.asus.com/Commercial_Serve...9AIC2750SAS4L/
I have a low power alternative for my NAS - The XEON E5 is a nice beast but sucks up quite some power...
If you are still with me, you will now understand that I am trying to reuse the X9SRL-F with all the memory to run a reasonably sized Hackintosh.

I learnt MacOS thanks to the Hackintosh community back in 2007 when I was lucky enough to get the Gigabyte DS4+. Thanks to this experience, I ended up using several Mac mini's and Macbook Pro's and still have one from Mid2009.

Thanks to the latter, I actually used the approach recommended by Paradigm99 on a different thread with the dual Xeon on an Asus motherboard.

The good news is that I can get MacOS running on this motherboard - in safe mode only - after having cloned my 10.9.5 system from my Macbook pro to a spare SSD, then restarted using this SSD, then ran multibeast on this SSD and applied a few kexts (as MacPro 5,1) and finally moved this drive on the Supermicro motherboard.

Please note that I have removed the 3 x M1015 controllers and kept the setup to its bare minimum, modified the BIOS to disable VT-d and disable serial ports etc..

This motherboard has:

• no audio component (it's a server board), I will plug an USB audio component if successful
• 2 built-in e1000 NIC's
• USB2 ports only - no USB3
• VGA port (powered by a Matrox g200eW)
• Memory modules are 8 x 16GB FB-DIMM ECC
• SSD is an 480GB Mushkin Chronos
• GPU is an old Nivida 9400GT that I used only to check if the whole setup could work before justifying the investment in an GTX7xx series

In safe mode:
- NIC's are seen and up; I get an IP, can browse the internet
- 128GB RAM is reported although I had the memory slot utility dialog reporting a weird bank utilization especially since I used all the banks with 16GB modules, it shows that I had a mix of 8 and 16GB in wrong slot... probably due to my selection of MacPro5,1 when installing Multibeast after the clone
- I have an old NVIDIA 9400GT plugged in slot 5 that is seen by the system report in safe mode, however I am not sure why I get no signal on that one... I am planning on upgrading the BIOS of the motherboard to the latest once I have completed a full backup of my NAS (happening as I am typing this post).

In normal mode:
- it freezes after 'Swap subsystem is ON'

I was wondering whether there is a list of recommended kexts for this kind of architecture (c602). I have read on this site that it might not be easy to get sleep mode working but before buying the other motherboard and changing my NAS Mobo, I wanted to verify whether I could recycle this Xeon/Memory etc... as a hackintosh.

I had no success in reaching the installer from a USB stick prepared as recommended here. I can boot in the USB, I tried different boot options playing with npci but no success even in safe mode, it always freezes somewhere during the boot process.

So here is my question:
What's the best way to progress from a 'working-ish' safe mode and identify which kexts to load/remove?

Thanks in advance for any help on this one.

 

[neuroman]

I have mine pretty much running smoothly. Doing some additional testing and installing OS X 10.10.3 right now. Will probably write up a guide since I do not see one anywhere.
Clover works much better than Chimera/Chameleon.
Needs boot args on initial boot:
-v npci=0x2000 cpus=1
Follow Asus x79 native PM guide and will work very well.
There is a kext here that will get the Intel card working and inject the device ID.

 

[neuroman]

i have everything working except the SAS controller which is not supported.
i will work on a guide next week when I have tine. Speedstep is possible the same way ASUS motherboards.
The intel CT ethernet injector works and supports link aggregation.
Geekbench score with an E5-1650v2 is almost 21000 - similar to the 6 core mac pro.