HaC Mini v2: NUC Hades Canyon with custom patches and OC support

Hi /r/hackintosh, I posted here two months ago with my project to build the perfect hackintosh replacement for the Mac mini which impressed me with the size and power but disappointed me with the lack of ports and GPU. My goal is to build a Hackintosh that is as good (if not better) than a real Mac mini and settle for nothing less of that by any means necessary.

After two months of reversing Intel BIOS code, finding and working around newly discovered Intel HW bugs, reversing and understanding XNU code, building custom drivers, and then trying to build an "apple like" installation experience, I'm back with some updates.

tl;dr

Here is the guide. Note everything here is specific to NUC8i7HNK/NUC8i7HVK but I invite others to fork the github code for your own device. Most of the important things work including PM, GPU acceleration, TB3 (with hotplug), and so on. The few major things that still does not work is here.

What's new?

Major changes since v1

  • Migration to OpenCore because OC is cleaner, more stable, faster, and more secure than Clover.
  • An automated installer. In Apple marketing speak, "we think this is really cool and hope you will love it." Essentially you build an OSX installer USB and then run the HaC Mini installer and choose the USB as the target. It will then patch the OSX installer that you plug in to the NUC. The OSX installer USB has OC installed on it to boot into the installer itself. Then (and this is the cool part), after the OSX install, it will then install OC to your SSD. If you already have an existing installation, you can run the same HaC Mini installer .pkg and choose your OSX partition as the target. It's as close to a "one click" hackintosh installer as you can get.
  • Fixes for Intel QuickSync, TB3 on wakeup, USB not waking up display workaround, SATA fixes, and more

Some more writeups

One of the major goal of this project is to document EVERYTHING. One pet peeve I have is seeing guides that tell you to do this or that without giving a reasoning behind it. I'm sure hours of work was put into discovering the fix, but I have no idea if it's applicable to my situation or not because I have no idea what the fix intend to do. Then you end up with a cargo cult of people declaring as fact certain things all hackintosh builds MUST do because they fixed some obscure bug on some hardware years ago. I want to show my work instead of just presenting the results.

  • Metal driver fix shows how I fixed a Metal shader bug and how I patched a userland driver from kernel.
  • Thunderbolt fix is about how TB3 issues were resolved.
  • HDA fix talks about porting a new controller/codec to AppleALC and how to map codec paths.
  • USB fix is the attempt to fix the USB wakeup bug and the discovery of an Intel hardware bug.
  • Secure Boot is a discussion of Intel x86 secure boot, how OpenCore contributes to it, and a comparison of platform security of T2 Macs and Hackintoshes.

Testers wanted

If you own a NUC8i7HNK/NUC8i7HVK device, please help beta test v2.1 and submit a test report. Specifically, I'm looking for the following configurations I cannot test myself

  • Anyone with a NUC8i7HNK device. Especially test GPU related stuff since my patches are all targeting the NUC8i7HVK GPU.
  • An 5K display, preferably an Apple approved LG 5K display.
  • eGPU including ejecting and hotplugging eGPU
submitted by /u/osy86
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