68 replies to this topic

[bobstrike]

Shailua, you are a genius!

I haven't had time to test this out yet, but will be doing so shortly with my Atheros AR8161 Lan card in this Asus N56VM I have and will post my results!

Can't wait to test it out, actually gave up on running OSX on this laptop due to the Ethernet not being supported so this gives me new hope!

Now if I could only convince you to try and port over support for this Intel wireless card as well...

I am on Asus n56VM as well and the kext works perfectly (pretty fast) on Clover UEFI (great boot loader!) v2 in S/L/E But in chameleon the kext output an error message and is not loaded.
Hope it helps

[p.H]

I am on Asus n56VM as well and the kext works perfectly (pretty fast) on Clover UEFI (great boot loader!) v2 in S/L/E But in chameleon the kext output an error message and is not loaded.
Hope it helps

it's worth noticing this problem.
Maybe you can avoid kp for chameleon by boot with -f

[bobstrike]

Thank you for your reply P.H
Maybe I didnt express myself properly .
during the boot wit -v the appear th message
[ALXethernet] Error: Cannot allocate memory for descriptor ring, size=45000
[ALXethernet] Error: Unable to allocate descriptors.
The system boots but no kext loaded .

[p.H]

Thank you for your reply P.H
Maybe I didnt express myself properly .
during the boot wit -v the appear th message
[ALXethernet] Error: Cannot allocate memory for descriptor ring, size=45000
[ALXethernet] Error: Unable to allocate descriptors.
The system boots but no kext loaded .

maybe we have to wait Shailua for its answer.

[Shailua]

Thanks for the error report! That's one of my "oh no this should never happen!" messages, so it's easy for me to pinpoint. I've been tinkering with the memory allocation code a bit lately, so I've hopefully fixed it with a more suitable allocation method that isn't a holdover from the original AtherosL1cEthernet code. Asking the kernel to allocate chunks of contiguous physical memory tends to be rather touchy, but I don't think these cards tolerate anything less. I'll double check everything is still working okay on my desktop machine when I'm back home tomorrow and hopefully get 1.0.2 out soon after that.

[p.H]

Thanks for the error report! That's one of my "oh no this should never happen!" messages, so it's easy for me to pinpoint. I've been tinkering with the memory allocation code a bit lately, so I've hopefully fixed it with a more suitable allocation method that isn't a holdover from the original AtherosL1cEthernet code. Asking the kernel to allocate chunks of contiguous physical memory tends to be rather touchy, but I don't think these cards tolerate anything less. I'll double check everything is still working okay on my desktop machine when I'm back home tomorrow and hopefully get 1.0.2 out soon after that.

Looking forward to it. This kext should have improved lots lots lots of hackintoshers's experience.

[Shailua]

1.0.2 is now up. Hopefully the memory allocation will be more forgiving now, but if the problems persist for some folks then I'll have look into rewriting some of the descriptor stuff. Hmm, unless it's a 32-bit issue. I haven't tried this driver at all in 32-bit mode since I'm on 10.8. One day I might add another HDD and install 10.7 with the 32-bit kernel for testing purposes. I have a old netbook I could also try that has an 8152 chipset in it, but getting Mac OS X working on an AMD Fusion laptop is a bit of a headache.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. Good luck with testing everyone. Everything's fine on my machine so far while sending several gigabytes back and forth between it and my MacBook. Things definitely seem to transfer in both directions about 10-20MB/s faster with this driver than the AtherosL1cEthernet driver.

[p.H]

1.0.2 is now up. Hopefully the memory allocation will be more forgiving now, but if the problems persist for some folks then I'll have look into rewriting some of the descriptor stuff. Hmm, unless it's a 32-bit issue. I haven't tried this driver at all in 32-bit mode since I'm on 10.8. One day I might add another HDD and install 10.7 with the 32-bit kernel for testing purposes. I have a old netbook I could also try that has an 8152 chipset in it, but getting Mac OS X working on an AMD Fusion laptop is a bit of a headache.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. Good luck with testing everyone. Everything's fine on my machine so far while sending several gigabytes back and forth between it and my MacBook. Things definitely seem to transfer in both directions about 10-20MB/s faster with this driver than the AtherosL1cEthernet driver.

Do you think it's necessary to switch my AtherosL1cEthernet to this new driver?
My spec is AR8152 v1.1

[p.H]

1.0.2 is now up. Hopefully the memory allocation will be more forgiving now, but if the problems persist for some folks then I'll have look into rewriting some of the descriptor stuff. Hmm, unless it's a 32-bit issue. I haven't tried this driver at all in 32-bit mode since I'm on 10.8. One day I might add another HDD and install 10.7 with the 32-bit kernel for testing purposes. I have a old netbook I could also try that has an 8152 chipset in it, but getting Mac OS X working on an AMD Fusion laptop is a bit of a headache.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. Good luck with testing everyone. Everything's fine on my machine so far while sending several gigabytes back and forth between it and my MacBook. Things definitely seem to transfer in both directions about 10-20MB/s faster with this driver than the AtherosL1cEthernet driver.

http://d.pr/i/OWAI
here is my problem.
When I'm using just as I always did. Suddenly my hack hanged. I have to press the power button to restart my hack

[bobstrike]

What A GENIUS !!!!
You are
Thank you Shailua !

[Shailua]

Do you think it's necessary to switch my AtherosL1cEthernet to this new driver?
My spec is AR8152 v1.1

The AR8152 is a 100Mb/s (non-gigabit) adapter, so it might not be worth switching if the other driver works fine. Speed is only really an issue if you transfer a lot of files around over your ethernet LAN or have a *really* fast Internet connection.

http://d.pr/i/OWAI
here is my problem.
When I'm using just as I always did. Suddenly my hack hanged. I have to press the power button to restart my hack

That's very unfortunate. The MAC reset errors seem to be the issue. These are sent out by some of the low-level internal hardware code when something goes wrong. Was there any other [ALXEthernet] messages other than the MAC reset errors that you can see in /var/log/system.log from the Console app? If not it might be a problem that can only be fixed with a Linux patch from Atheros themselves. I'll try and investigate further if I can though.
Sometimes I've noticed the ethernet card can go a little odd when a new kext is loaded for the first time though. You could try unplugging all power from your PC for a few seconds and then booting and see if it helps. There's a (very slim) chance that it might help.

[p.H]

The AR8152 is a 100Mb/s (non-gigabit) adapter, so it might not be worth switching if the other driver works fine. Speed is only really an issue if you transfer a lot of files around over your ethernet LAN or have a *really* fast Internet connection.



That's very unfortunate. The MAC reset errors seem to be the issue. These are sent out by some of the low-level internal hardware code when something goes wrong. Was there any other [ALXEthernet] messages other than the MAC reset errors that you can see in /var/log/system.log from the Console app? If not it might be a problem that can only be fixed with a Linux patch from Atheros themselves. I'll try and investigate further if I can though.
Sometimes I've noticed the ethernet card can go a little odd when a new kext is loaded for the first time though. You could try unplugging all power from your PC for a few seconds and then booting and see if it helps. There's a (very slim) chance that it might help.

i've switched back to the previous kext.
I want to keep a more stable hack for my personal reasons. Appreciation for this new kext anyway.

[Rouge1]

That's very unfortunate. The MAC reset errors seem to be the issue. These are sent out by some of the low-level internal hardware code when something goes wrong. Was there any other [ALXEthernet] messages other than the MAC reset errors that you can see in /var/log/system.log from the Console app? If not it might be a problem that can only be fixed with a Linux patch from Atheros themselves. I'll try and investigate further if I can though.
Sometimes I've noticed the ethernet card can go a little odd when a new kext is loaded for the first time though. You could try unplugging all power from your PC for a few seconds and then booting and see if it helps. There's a (very slim) chance that it might help.

Working fine with 1.0.2 driver, no mac reset errors on the log.

MB: GA-Z77-DS3H v1.1

NIC: AR8161

OS: 10.8.2

[redproc82]

Thanks for this! It's working perfectly, at full gigabit rates, with my GA-Z77-D3H (F14) and 10.8.2.

I had zero success with Maolj's Atheros kext.

[p.H]

Thanks for this! It's working perfectly, at full gigabit rates, with my GA-Z77-D3H (F14) and 10.8.2.

I had zero success with Maolj's Atheros kext.

Maolj's kext is really quite old.
congrats

[kmcdl]

Shailua, thank you very much! After installing that kext from ALXEthernet-1.0.2.zip, my AR8161/8165 works. I can now log in app store!!!

[Shailua]

Glad to hear it's working for those it's working for.

I've been tinkering with my AO522 netbook and managed to get Snow Leopard working on it, albeit rather poorly given it's an AMD C-50 processor with only fallback 800x600 graphics working. It's been good enough to allow me to install a Snow Leopard build of ALXEthernet however, so now I have an AR8152 v2.0 chipset to test things out on as well. I discovered a previously reported bug with running 32-bit drivers compiled with Xcode 4.5, so I'm back to using 4.4 for now. Xcode 4.4 with the Snow Leopard APIs and a minor code change later and the driver was working fine on the netbook. Still going to do some more testing but then I should be able to release builds for 10.6 as well as 10.7/10.8.

[slipnfall]

Basic functionality confirmed (obtained DHCP, HTTP traffic OK):

Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H (v1.1) BIOS F9
(AR8161 chipset).
ML 10.8.2

Thanks for your contribution - my first hackintosh is now actually usable.

(Note, that version 1.0 of the above MB would work 'out of the box' with the existing Atheros driver in ###### - would not work with this v1.1 chipset)

ALX Ethernet Driver:
Name: Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet
Type: Ethernet Controller
Bus: PCI
Vendor ID: 0x1969
Device ID: 0x1091
Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x1458
Subsystem ID: 0xe000
Revision ID: 0x0010
Link Width: x1
BSD name: en0
Kext name: ALXEthernet.kext
Location: /System/Library/Extensions/ALXEthernet.kext
Version: 1.0.2

[chaseacton]

Works great, but still cannot connect to iCloud, App Store, etc.

Running a GA H77 DS3H

[p.H]

Works great, but still cannot connect to iCloud, App Store, etc.

Running a GA H77 DS3H

That's not the case here. You need to search for solution elsewhere in the forum.