NootedRed and vendor locked UMA buffer sizes.

I recently became aware like many people of the NootedRed project that enables AMD APU's to work with Mac OS, however one of the requirements for the project is you must have more than 512mb of dedicated VRAM, which is set by the UMA buffer size.

Now I have a Dell inspiron 15 5575. It has the following specs:

  • Ryzen 5 2500U
  • Vega 8 graphics
  • 16GB RAM

Now you would think that it meets the requirements to use NootedRed, however Dell in thier infinite wisdom set the UMA buffer to 256mb. The BIOS options for this device are very barebones and thier is no official way to change it. There is a post on the Dell forums from 2020 asking about this, but dell didn't seem to be intrested in doing anything.

The other day I was looking at a post about the new AMD PState driver for the Linux kernel. Someone mentioned the need for the CPPC driver to be enabled and if you didn't have the option you could use a tool called smokeless_UMAF to access locked BIOS options.

It turns out smokeless_UMAF unlocks a whole host of other options aswell from overclocking to (thankfully) the UMA buffer.

So I downloaded it changed the UMA buffer to 2GB and booted back into Windows, to find that indeed my dedicated VRAM is now 2GB and it has no problem utilising more than the factory 256mb VRAM.

So now obviously I'm going to give hackintoshing this laptop a go when I get a chance to see how it goes.

tl:dr

If you can't change your UMA Buffer size, give smokeless_UMAF a try and you'll most likely be able to.

https://github.com/DavidS95/Smokeless_UMAF

submitted by /u/iceixia
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