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Dell XPS 8700 haswell system - 10.9 Mavericks


slave-zeo
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Much like others around the internets I have the rebooting problem when trying to boot the mavericks installer on my Dell XPS 8700.

 

I've tried turning off secure boot and UEFI (putting it in legacy mode) with no luck. It still reboots.

 

If anyone has one of these machines and can offer any advice, please do. Or if anyone has anything to chime in on that might help, please do also. I'm willing to try boot strings or anything else that might help.

 

As a fedora box this thing screams but I miss OS X. Thanks.

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OK, I gathered some more information about my Dell XPS 8700 and OS X last night. I finally achieved great success installing 10.9 Mavericks after using an unmodified Kernel compiled from the original sources. This kept the computer from rebooting over and over again.

 

You'll still need to make a USB installer stick using a 8GB or bigger thumbdrive. Use Pandora or MyHack to do so. After it's finished with your thumbdrive replace the stock kernel with the recompiled one. Your thumbdrive should now boot into the Mavericks installer (using the -x kernel flag at boot up).

 

After making your installer you'll need to dive into 8700s BIOS and change a couple of things for OS X to install and run. Turn off Secure Boot and enable Legacy instead of UEFI. Save your settings and reboot into the installer.

 

Keep in mind you'll need a smbios.plist, com.boot.chameleon.plist, fakesmc.kext and the null power management kernel extension (didn't need the null power extension after all), these will most likely be created or included by Pandora or MyHack. The proper mac model is iMac14,2

 

I also figured out the network and sound drivers. The network was a pain in the ass considering it's a fairly common chip set (Realtek RTL8111). The soundchip is a strange Realtek used only in this machine, luckily the ALC898 drivers work with it. The bluetooth module works but the wireless network does not.

 

It was late and I was sleepy when I was working on this project. I did a really poor job of documenting where I found the drivers and who created/packaged them. I mean NO DISRESPECT to the packagers/authors and I'll post links to the sources as soon as I can find them again. Below are the kernel and drivers i used.

 

Sound - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g7o08ykgisfky8h/TvsOZOnX5D/Audio_ALC898.zip

 

Network - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g7o08ykgisfky8h/Yi95ISaMPj/Network_RealtekRTL8111-Binary.zip

 

Kernel - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g7o08ykgisfky8h/oauZKIRCDi/mach_kernel.zip

 

Patched Vanilla Kernel - https://www.dropbox.com/s/srjfjfjahr07ktn/mach_kernel_patched.zip

 

I used Kext Wizard to install the kernel extensions.

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Most things seem to be working fine, I just can't get iCloud / Messages / Facetime to work. I've tried about every fix I could find by searching Google with no luck. From what I've read it might be something with the Machine's UUID, It is using the generated one instead of the one provided by the computer it's self. Of course, I could be totally barking up the wrong tree.

 

Luckily, The App Store works as it should.

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Most things seem to be working fine, I just can't get iCloud / Messages / Facetime to work. I've tried about every fix I could find by searching Google with no luck. From what I've read it might be something with the Machine's UUID, It is using the generated one instead of the one provided by the computer it's self. Of course, I could be totally barking up the wrong tree.

 

Luckily, The App Store works as it should.

What kind of bootloader do you use Chameleon ? and have you with chameleon also the filenvram module activated, maybe you can also try Clover.

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Pepto, I am using chameleon with the filenvram activated. I also have Ethernet=BuiltIn and my ethernet on en0. I'm not sure why it's not working, honestly.

 

Clover will not work with my mouse for some strange reason. It's kind of impossible to use it.

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How is the system performance? Have you used it for rendering / CPU intensive tasks?

 

Also any DSDT planned soon? Feel like if the kernel provided fixed the reboot error this could be done before that via a custom DSDT loaded from the installer then the chameleon loader.

 

Thanks for your mini-guide and kext/kernel files!

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  • 1 month later...

 

Keep in mind you'll need a smbios.plist, com.boot.chameleon.plist, fakesmc.kext and the null power management kernel extension, these will most likely be created or included by Pandora or MyHack. The proper mac model is iMac14,2

 

Great news, thanks for your work. I've got the MyHack installer together with the kernel you provided, and modified my bios per your instructions. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on the above step.  When I run the installer I get an error about an unrecognized CPU or some {censored} about power management. 

 

Couple questions:  Are the kext files above run via bootflags (Like "NullCPUPowerManagement = Yes"?).

 

The MyHack installer has these files organized like this:

  • Extra / org.org.chameleon.Boot.plst
  • Extra / Extensions / FakeSMC.kext
  • Extra / Extensions / NullCPUPowerManagement.kext

 

i can't seem to find smbios.plst on the installer, any input on how and where I should have this file?

I'm also not too sure about the mac model, so I'm going to pretend that doesn't exist.

 

Clearly I'm pretty novice at this, so I appreciate your patience, thanks in advance!

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  • 4 weeks later...

I finally achieved great success installing 10.9 Mavericks after using an unmodified Kernel compiled from the sources .

That's why iCloud services doesn't work for you and never will: a piece of the process of enabling these services is inside the kernel, and this specific piece is not given away by Apple with its open source XNU project. You must revert to the stock kernel. It should work: almost all Macs use Haswell/8-series chipset by now. Give it a try!

 

All the best!

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  • 2 weeks later...

On the 10.9 / 10.9.1 kernel the system reboots when it loads the kernel. Maybe with the next kernel we'll see greater success. At least I'm hoping so.

 

That's why iCloud services doesn't work for you and never will: a piece of the process of enabling these services is inside the kernel, and this specific piece is not given away by Apple with its open source XNU project. You must revert to the stock kernel. It should work: almost all Macs use Haswell/8-series chipset by now. Give it a try!

All the best!

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I am using a patched kernel now instead of the recompiled kernel. The patched one disables writes to possibly locked MSRs instead of just ripping out the offending parts of the kernel. I found the information here http://racerrehabman.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/maverickshaswell-kernel-patch-for-early-reboot/ . Patching was a single command which i did on another Mac then moved the kernel to my thumb drive replacing the stock kernel. The installer booted with the -x boot flag and installed as it should.

 

While iCloud and the App Store work, iMassage still does not. But on a positive note my system is much more stable, especially while booting, using the patched instead of the recompiled kernel.

 

Im still playing around...

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Any chance you could Drop Box the patched kernel or an image of your installer?

 

I can complete the install successfully (albeit only by booting into the installer with -x), but I have yet to figure out why I can't boot up after the install. Seems my specs are slightly different than yours (i7 3770 vs i7 4770).

 

There are many variables that I haven't tested yet, unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to devote to this project. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

***Note I'm trying to install on a partitioned drive where Win 8 was installed first.  I don't want to remove my win 8 partition.  If you guys think this might be a source of my problems I may just head out and buy a separate drive to try my Mavericks install. What say you?

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Blonny, here is an archive of the PATCHED vanilla kernel.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/srjfjfjahr07ktn/mach_kernel_patched.zip

 

I've never had much luck installing Windows (or any other OS) on the same disk with OS X. I know it's possible but I haven't been able to pull it off.

 

Still plowing ahead on the iMessage thing...

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*BAM* the patched instead of recompiled kernel fixed it. iCloud, IMessage, and FaceTime all work!

 

Thanks for the train of thought, theconnactic.

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2/18/14 7:07:43.000 PM kernel[0]: MSRDumper PStatesReached: 8 34 35 36 37 38

 

I get this with MSRDumper.kext, so it looks like the freq scaling is working. Just thought id share it.

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How is the system performance? Have you used it for rendering / CPU intensive tasks? Also any DSDT planned soon? Feel like if the kernel provided fixed the reboot error this could be done before that via a custom DSDT loaded from the installer then the chameleon loader. Thanks for your mini-guide and kext/kernel files!

 

post-446-0-99953800-1392783310_thumb.png

 

post-446-0-96836700-1392783298_thumb.png

 

The cinebench score seems a little low, but I'm not complaining. Geekbench is right in line with what I thought I'd get.

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Any chance you could Drop Box the patched kernel or an image of your installer?

 

I can complete the install successfully (albeit only by booting into the installer with -x), but I have yet to figure out why I can't boot up after the install. Seems my specs are slightly different than yours (i7 3770 vs i7 4770).

 

There are many variables that I haven't tested yet, unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to devote to this project. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

***Note I'm trying to install on a partitioned drive where Win 8 was installed first.  I don't want to remove my win 8 partition.  If you guys think this might be a source of my problems I may just head out and buy a separate drive to try my Mavericks install. What say you?

 

The 4770 has VT-d and for some reason the 8700 does not disable VT-d when you disable hardware virtualization in the BIOS. You must pass the kernel flag "dart=0" to chameleon in order to fully disable VT-d on this system. You do not need to use the -x flag to install if you use dart=0 to disable VT-d.

*BAM* the patched instead of recompiled kernel fixed it. iCloud, IMessage, and FaceTime all work!

 

Thanks for the train of thought, theconnactic.

 

Thanks for the kernel, with the previous one I was able to get the system up and running after spending several hours debugging the FakeSMC errors thrown by the presence of VT-d. Now I can use iCloud, iMessage, and everything else under the sun!

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post-446-0-14937300-1393153684_thumb.png

 

post-446-0-52383300-1393154432_thumb.png

 

I re-ran Cinebench with nothing else running (as it suguests) and this is what I came up with, 708cb. For reference, I get 750cb in windows 8 on this same computer. So it's not that far off.

 

Same goes for Geekbench 3 32-bit. I managed to squeeze out 13,294. I can't remember what I got in Geekbench under Windows for comparison, but it was very similar in the low 13k range.

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@slave

 

Have you had a chance to patch the 10.9.2 kernel yet? They updated to 13.1.0 Darwin in this version. 

 

Edit: Was able to get the perl patch working from the aforementioned blog:

perl -pi -e 's|\x74\x6c(\x48\x83\xc7\x28\x90\x8b\x05..\x5e\x00\x85\x47\xdc)\x74\x54(\x8b\x4f\xd8\x45\x85\xc0\x74\x08\x44\x39\xc1\x44\x89\xc1)\x75\x44(\x0f\x32\x89\xc0\x48\xc1\xe2\x20\x48\x09\xc2\x48\x89\x57\xf8\x48\x8b\x47\xe8\x48\x85\xc0\x74\x06\x48\xf7\xd0\x48\x21\xc2\x48\x0b\x57\xf0\x49\x89\xd1\x49\xc1\xe9\x20\x89\xd0\x8b\x4f\xd8\x4c\x89\xca)(\x0f\x30\x8b\x4f\xd8\x0f\x32\x89\xc0\x48\xc1\xe2\x20\x48\x09\xc2\x48\x89\x17\x48\x83\xc7\x30\xff\xce)\x75\x99(\x5d\xc3)\x90{7}|\x74\x73${1}\x74\x5b${2}\x75\x4b${3}\x66\x81\xf9\xe2\x00\x74\x02${4}\x75\x92${5}|g' mach_kernel
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@slave

 

Have you had a chance to patch the 10.9.2 kernel yet? They updated to 13.1.0 Darwin in this version. 

 

Edit: Was able to get the perl patch working from the aforementioned blog:

perl -pi -e 's|\x74\x6c(\x48\x83\xc7\x28\x90\x8b\x05..\x5e\x00\x85\x47\xdc)\x74\x54(\x8b\x4f\xd8\x45\x85\xc0\x74\x08\x44\x39\xc1\x44\x89\xc1)\x75\x44(\x0f\x32\x89\xc0\x48\xc1\xe2\x20\x48\x09\xc2\x48\x89\x57\xf8\x48\x8b\x47\xe8\x48\x85\xc0\x74\x06\x48\xf7\xd0\x48\x21\xc2\x48\x0b\x57\xf0\x49\x89\xd1\x49\xc1\xe9\x20\x89\xd0\x8b\x4f\xd8\x4c\x89\xca)(\x0f\x30\x8b\x4f\xd8\x0f\x32\x89\xc0\x48\xc1\xe2\x20\x48\x09\xc2\x48\x89\x17\x48\x83\xc7\x30\xff\xce)\x75\x99(\x5d\xc3)\x90{7}|\x74\x73${1}\x74\x5b${2}\x75\x4b${3}\x66\x81\xf9\xe2\x00\x74\x02${4}\x75\x92${5}|g' mach_kernel

 

This is extremely awesome. Have you tested this patch and everything works ok?

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I've had good luck thus far with the patch, although I did get a hardlock while playing WoW. Only one though.

 

thanks again for the find.

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