AMD Support News, What the Hell I’m Doing These Days, and Future Plans

38
Posted by nawcom on April 17, 2012 – 6:08 pm
Filed under osx86

First off, a few shoutouts and thank yous.

Thanks to bronzovka for officially getting the Lion kernel working with AMD CPUs. He has definitely helped spark the interest in running OS X on AMDs once again. Many people have either given up or moved to Intel.

A man by the name of R:A:W:X86 has cleaned up some kp issues with Bulldozer AMDs, so thanks to him, we now have AMD machines running the 64 bit Lion apps.

Me being out of cash and an AMD system to work on, I was lucky enough to have 3 pals, iztech, PolishOX, and rhcp donate enough that I can get an entry-level Bulldozer CPU to work with. Starting in May, I should have enough to get a motherboard to work with the CPU, and I will then get back into AMD osx86 stuff.

What am I doing these days? With managing medical issues, I’ve been studying up for taking the RHCSA and RHCE, so hopefully I will succeed with that and take advantage of it once I am in good enough shape to get back into the workforce. I had to put osx86 stuff to the side, but I am planning on putting more focus onto it starting in May.

Over the last year I was saving up to put together this little media center, and I finally completed in getting all the parts. I bought the Zotac Z68-ITX-B-E earlier in 2011 and finally got around to getting a cheap i3 processor to power it. It’s all inside this sweet case with LCD. I have get to get the LCD working in OS X – well, I can technically get it working, but that requires that I unplug and replug in the device to the mobo while the OS is running. According to some notes for a similar USB LCD, you need to use a plist-only kext to get the USB kexts to correctly detect it at boot time. I have yet to get that working, dunno if I will.

Anyways I’ll be posting more info on this later, for those who need help with getting that Z68-ITX-B-E mobo working correctly. I got the builtin GT430 working right, as well as its displayport audio/video working as well. (well, with a displayport->hdmi adapter.)

I had a little secret project I wanted to work on for Lion, but I had to stop. I think I decided I will resume it with Mountain Lion in focus. Think ModUSB/ModCD but with much more features before. Who knows, maybe its name will start with a v…

Well expect more activity on this blog, especially with Mountain Lion coming. Stay tuned…

Mac OS X? Not Any Longer

39
Posted by nawcom on February 24, 2012 – 8:36 pm
Filed under Uncategorized

Someone pointed this out to me today, and it seems I’ve been completely oblivious to the change. The official name is no longer Mac OS X. Only OS X. No more Mac.

I can’t wait for 10.9′s name: iOS X.

Mountain Lion Preview

27
Posted by nawcom on February 16, 2012 – 1:26 pm
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , ,

Mac OS X 10.8: Mountain Lion

I’m currently downloading it from the App Store (pay Apple $99 for ADC access and you too can, hehe). It’s taking forever. I should have downloaded and installed (well it depends on the challenges given to me by its installer) by tonight, so this post should be updated by then with new info.


Running 10.8 on my Alienware M11x R1 laptop

Some things that need to get fixed:

  • Sandbox issues with some of the main apps. Fixed with a reinstall.
  • USB problems with my laptop. The fixes in the DSDT.aml that I use seem to cause serious issues with the kernel for some odd reason.Stopped happening, so that’s good
  • I can’t give out support for Prerelease versions of the OS (though I might give out a useful file here and there), so you’ll have to wait until it officially comes out, but I can start working on better Installer techniques.

For those who hate installing onto GUID disks

This definitely feels shaky and not ready to use as a main OS, at all. Hopefully it gets better in the next few releases.

Feel free to join us on IRC:

MBR-patched OSInstall framework and OSInstall.mpkg for 10.7.3 Installer media

19
Posted by nawcom on February 15, 2012 – 5:02 pm
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , , ,

Just posting the patched OSInstall framework and OSInstall.mpkg for the OS X 10.7.3 installer from the App Store who also need to install Lion to their disks that have non-GUID partition tables. I also took off the board-id check just for those who might find it useful.

Here you go: http://blog.nawcom.com/10.7.3_Installer_MBR_Patch.tar.gz

Just unpack to the root of the Install media’s volume with sudo. Example:

sudo tar xzvf ~/Downloads/10.7.3_Installer_MBR_Patch.tar.gz -C \
/Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System

I made me a nice Lion Atom Kernel :D

Posted by nawcom on September 1, 2011 – 5:15 am
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , ,

A while ago after the xnu source for 10.7 came out I decided to patch up the source code to match up with what meklort‘s private kernel patcher module for Chameleon does for atom processors in addition to my little version overriding fix with Extensions.mkext overriding the kexts in kernelcache. He gave me permission to give out the equivalent changes his patcher module does, but only via kernel source.

I didn’t post them just because I was mostly gone but since I’ve had free time (I’ve been idling on IRC lately) I decided to post this stuff. Here’s the kernel for 10.7.1, only patched for atom. Lemme list other things it does though.

Binary: mach_kernel_atom.10.7.1.bz2

Source diff: 10.7.1_atom.diff

A few changes in it other than getting it to run on an atom processor:

  • In OSKext.cpp, I ditched a goto so a kext in /Extra/Extensions.mkext or /Extra/Extensions/*.kext will not be disregarded if you are also loading kernelcache which also contains that same kext (versions don’t matter in this case) at the same time. Before it would simply disregard the kext in /E/E and goto finish – now it continues down and does version checking between the two to see which one to use first.

    Some still-current issues with loading kernelcache + /E/E at the same time though – if you are using a parent kext in /E/E in which a kext in /S/L/E depends on and it ends up overriding the lower-version equivalent parent kext in /S/L/E, you will result in a linking error. I will look into it later, but if anyone is willing to play around with this issue, then have fun.

  • Next up in bootstrap.cpp is the core part of what gets the kernel to load /E/E when it is also loading kernelcache instead of ignoring it, credit goes to meklort. This simply injects readBooterExtensions() into the right spot to get it loading the mkext.

Have fun, play with the source, be sure and give credit to those who deserve it. Yell at me if anything else needs to be noted.

Oh I also thought about AMD stuff. I haven’t really played with AMD lately. I guess I should, since not anyone really has gotten it working. I did see AnV make a lion legacy kernel, but since tested, it has failed every AMD user. So we still have some things to get finished I suppose.

Medical Issues

Posted by nawcom on July 18, 2011 – 4:13 am
Filed under Personal

I’m gonna be gone for a while due to some medical issues.

I will try and finish up the package patching system for voltron but other than that, I won’t be available in my usual spots, because I will be mostly away from the computer, and probably not in a state to help anyone with things.

Read More »

OSInstall framework and mpkg for Lion

Posted by nawcom on July 2, 2011 – 10:11 pm
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , , , ,

Just posting the patched OSInstall framework and OSInstall.mpkg for those developers who have grabbed the Lion GM release from the App Store who also need to install Lion to their disks that have non-GUID partition tables. I also took off the board-id check just for those who might find it useful.

Here you go: http://blog.nawcom.com/Lion_OSInstall_GM.tar.bz2

Just unpack to the root of the Install media’s volume with sudo. Example:

sudo tar xjvf ~/Downloads/Lion_OSInstall_GM.tar.bz2 -C \
/Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Base\ System

SleepEnabler for Lion 10.7.0 Latest + Some News

Posted by nawcom on June 30, 2011 – 6:07 pm
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , ,

Okay first of all I decided to use the latest rtclock.h from OS X 10.6.8′s xnu kernel + the usual headers used in SleepEnabler with the Lion kernel’s PM_DISPATCH_VERSION (which is 102, a big jump from 10.6.8′s 23, isn’t it?) to help enable sleep support for those using NullCPUPowerManagement in the latest Lion Developer Preview. Here you go. This works fine for 10.6.x too.

http://blog.nawcom.com/SleepEnabler.kext.10.7.x.zip

Want the source code? Here’s the source code: http://blog.nawcom.com/SleepEnabler.src.zip

If you update the code and make a new release, be sure to include the credits to the code that meklort and I added in addition to simek’s. Note this is something NOT RELATED TO THIS. Not sure what the person here is attempting to do, other than get a kext under his or her name for no reason.

The plan is to still move this SleepEnabler work over into the bootloader so we don’t have to deal with a silly kernel extension for covering this known issue, so keep up to date on the news with that.

As for more news, it will relate to me taking a break from OSx86. I’ll write this in a few hours if you catch this early post.

[UPDATED] legacy kernel for OS X10.6.8 / Darwin 10.8.0, SleepEnabler

Posted by nawcom on June 28, 2011 – 2:55 am
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , , , , ,

EDIT: Oops, the link wasn’t updated correctly – it was still linked to the old pkg. fixed now :) – my fault.

There’s been some big changes with the xnu source between 10.6.7 and 10.6.8 – from what I understand, it has to do with moving to the new Lion 10.7 version of OS X. So a few different things needed to get updated in the legacy kernel code – cpuid.c, rtclock.c, tsc.c mostly.

Here’s the updated legacy kernel and SleepEnabler kext for OS X 10.6.8 / Darwin 10.8.0.

As you know, the legacy kernel installer package will upgrade your SleepEnabler kext, if it finds one loaded. For those who just want the SleepEnabler kext updated for 10.6.8 by itself, here you go:

Looks like the fix for AMD people with graphics issues was to use old PCI and ACPI kexts from 10.6.7 as Aaron Johns said. We have to find out how to get these AMDs to work with the new kexts. For now though, I updated the pkg so if you have an AMD machine, it installs 10.6.7 IOPCIFamily.kext and IOACPIPlatform.kext into /Extra/Extensions, set to override the regular ones in /S/L/E. If you have an Intel machine, the pkg simply skips installing these there. So far it works fine for me.

Anyways have fun. I will let you know of the new changes I make later.

Lion Installer for Alienware M11x

Posted by nawcom on June 25, 2011 – 3:38 pm
Filed under osx86
Tagged as , , , ,

I decided to make myself a little installer app for my friend’s Alienware M11x as well as my own (this is the laptop I ended up getting instead of the Dell one). So even though it’s a personal thing, I might as well post it on the blog.

Read More »