My upgrade from a very stable and mostly functional build in Mojave to Catalina had proven difficult, and in troubleshooting, I decided to (what the hell!) try moving to OpenCore. I have a fairly shaky, merely high-level grasp of how hackintoshing works from a technical perspective, but the vanilla OpenCore guide is excellent, along with /u/corpnewt's scripts, automating a great deal I don't fully understand and making the whole process much more straightforward than it used to be.
The few issues I did encounter along the way were handled by either reading the OpenCore documentation more closely or eventually realizing that I had just done something stupid. It was handy to already be able to boot in Catalina (10.15.1) through Clover in making the transition to OpenCore, but things that weren't working or were unstable with Clover in Catalina are now, after several days and some stress testing, very stable on OpenCore.
A few notes/gotchas that may or may not help others:
- For a while, I was getting a kernel panic during boot that was not writing to the logs, making it hard to investigate; I eventually found (clued in via some words I could make out by filming the screen with the at high shutter speed on my phone, lol) that I had simply neglected some of the patches provided by SSDTTime for my machine (this is really a dumb user error, but since SSDTTime is mentioned only in the ACPI/Add section of the guide, it might be helpful to remind readers to include the other plist entries provided by the script as well).
- My fancy (USB) keyboard was not working in OpenCore, though it worked to navigate the Bios and after boot; I had to plug in another, simpler USB keyboard for OpenCore. This was fixed by removing UsbKbDxe.efi and setting KeySupport=true.
- I wasn't starting with a fresh install, and I had several old, old kexts in System/Library/Extensions and Library/Extensions, now that I am injecting all the hackintosh kexts through the bootloader. I believe it helped (was perhaps even necessary) to remove these and rebuild the kext cache, though I might be off on this. It obviously would have been simpler in general to start with a fresh install.
Relevant Hardware:
- Intel i5-9600K @ 3.7 GHz
- Gigabyte H370M-D3H (on firmware F13)
- Radeon RX 5700 XT
- Broadcom BCM94360CS2 Wifi/Bluetooth
iMac18,3 SMBIOS
What works:
- Sleep/wake
- All USB ports (choosing some USB2 vs USB3 via custom SSDT created with help of USBMap)
- iMessage, FaceTime (with USB webcam)
- Wifi/Bluetooth, including handoff, airdrop, continuity features (I could never get Bluetooth to work before; I'm not exactly sure what changed—perhaps it just involved grabbing the latest relevant kexts).
- Ethernet
- Onboard audio
- Dual 4k monitor/HiDPI
- Booting into Windows through OpenCore
What doesn't:
- NVRAM—I tried the steps in the Vanilla guide to address my unsupported NVRAM, but I haven't yet been successful. I plan on returning to this later to investigate more, but it's not a high priority.
- As far as I can tell, my BIOS does not expose the ability to disable CFG lock; I found the offset in the firmware, but I haven't yet tried using the modified GRUB shell to change the value.
Untested:
- Haven't tested (and don't really care to) hibernation
- Demanding graphics/video decoding
- Enabling (partially) SIP
I'm really pleased with how well the OpenCore setup went; I know things are still in flux, but between the guide, documentation, and available scripts to partially automate some tricky/tedious bits, I think more techinically-minded users who don't have a full grasp of all the underlying mechanics should definitely consider giving OpenCore a try. One benefit is there is a whole let less guessing/misinformation/conflicting advice around OpenCore at this point than there is for Clover. Googling issues around Clover-related issues always gave me a mindfield of confusing posts and advice. This will inevitably change as OpenCore becomes more popular, but it really helped to have a more streamlined set of sources; for instance, even though the H370 chipset is not all that popular relative to others at the moment, the guide flagged several potential issues for me to look out for.
https://preview.redd.it/emjy0q0nzc941.png?width=1396&format=png&auto=webp&s=e582c1b73cc4c9d913fdf594cc30dfbd946bebc4
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