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First off props to various people in #leoamd and massive kudos to Gotoh for elaborating on a few bits here and there.
My Install on AMD is up and running courtesy of Prawker's guide Leopard 9A581 on AMD
In this post I'll try to steer you in the right direction to get Geforce 7xxx series cards working on Leopard.
Take note that this guide goes thru the process of simply forcing drivers onto devices by means of ID matching in kernel extensions. This process is generic in that it can be applied for any device that's PCI based be it onboard like an ATA bus or a plug-in PCI device like a network card provided there's a driver of course.
If followed properly you should have QE / CI Acceleration and Dual Head support at the end of it all.
First things you'll need:
- A working Leopard install that atleast boots to framebuffer mode
- A working Tiger install or another OS that will allow you to read out PCI ID's
- (Tiger is nice to have, in case of an emergency and single user boot fails for some odd reason)
- Copy of NVinject 0.1.3 for Leopard (nvinject.free.fr)
- Knowing your way around in Terminal.app is a very big help
Disclaimer:
Most of this is based on my experience over the weekend with getting Leopard to run on my AMD X2 4200+ System that runs of an Albatron KM51PV Nforce 4 based board. Everything noted is how I assume it works deep within the Heart of the Beast and based on what I've read and talked about with various sources. YMMV in how accurate I am. I normally use an MDD G4 and an Mac Pro to earn my daily bread and getting it to run on this X86-based machine has sofar been an amusing experiment on expanding my knowledge of OS X besides doing the usuall POSIX based antics in OS X's UNIX underpinnings. Should your box all of a sudden radiate in a green glow, kill the neighbours dog, or cause any harm being it analog or digital it's not my problem
- Let's start off with some obligatory Q&A -
Q: WTF is a framebuffer mode and why do I need it?
A: A Framebuffer is the most basic video display method available that runs off the VBE video standard. Effectively it allows advanced higher resolutions without the need for accelerated video drivers. It's like a safe mode on steroids.
Leopard out of the box kernel panics with the NVidia drivers are active so in order for us to atleast have a framebuffer we need to make sure the NVidia drivers are off so the system is forced to framebuffer mode. This is a big help for people who don't have multiple machines at their dispose and like to read the guide while editing step by step. For you Hardcore POSIX Individuals, by all means go into single user mode and summon the power of VI
Q: WTF is a PCI ID and why do I want to know ?
A: Every operating system scans the PCI subsystem to see which devices are present and will then pass this list over to what ever hardware driver manager kit takes care of loading the drivers or kexts in our case. In order to avoid loading an ATI driver on an NVidia card it looks for matching ID's in it's driver library. As soon as the manager sees the Vendor ID "10de" coming by it knows it's dealing with something from NVidia. Then the next step it will do is look at the Device ID which in my case is "0295" for a GeForce 7950 this makes the final detection ID of "0x029510de". With this code it knows to load up Geforce.kext / NVDANV40HAL.kext / NVDAResMan.kext so it can enable full acceleration.
Q: So why won't things work out of the box like it did in Tiger with just adding NVInject / Titan / Natit / etc?
A: It seems that Leopard gets confused on what to do with all the PCI info it gets. From what I've gathered this issue is especially prelevalent for people using NForce boards. Leopard will come accross multiple Nvidia ID's and will try to match up / detect what ever it's got and then do not much at all or confuse the heck out of it self. Which is where this guide comes in.
- We are such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of -
Provided you've met the above requirements and have a booting Leopard and a Tiger as a bonus we shall begin.
First off you'll need your Vendor and Device ID. If you have Tiger this is easy:
- Open up System Profiler
- Click Graphics / Displays
You should see your Vendor ID / Device ID right in front of you split over two lines.
Take note of these as we'll need them.
In windows you should be able to chase up the Vendor ID / Device ID from the Device Manager and hitting up the properties of your card. keep an eye out for "10de" and there's a good chance you'll find your remaining 4 lucky digits.
--
Assuming you've properly patched and added the CPUID's into the NVidia kexts courtesy of Marvin's AMD Utility and various lists that are floating around we can start editing them.
Copy all the GeForce named kext files into /System/Library/Extensions/
Copy all the NVDAResMan.kext and NVDANV40.HAL into /System/Library/Extensions
(NVDANV10/20/30/50 do not apply for the 7xxx Series but you can of course always try to muck around with them if you don't have a 7xxx Series card)
If you want to compare / verify that you got the right kexts compare with the following listings. Open up Terminal.app found in /Applications/Utilities/
Proceed with the following set of commands one by one:
cd / cd /System/Library/Extensions/ ls -l | grep 'GeForce' ls -l | grep 'NVDA'
End result should be similar to:
Rawr-Dono:Extensions maci$ ls -l | grep 'GeForce' drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForce.kext drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForce2MXGLDriver.bundle drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForce3GLDriver.bundle drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForce8xxxGLDriver.bundle drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForceFXGLDriver.bundle drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:33 GeForceGA.plugin drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:32 GeForceVADriver.bundle Rawr-Dono:Extensions maci$ ls -l | grep 'NVDA' drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:32 NVDANV40Hal.kext drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 4 Nov 17:32 NVDAResman.kext
Open up your Leopard Hard Drive and go into
System > Library > Extensions
- Geforce.kext -
Right Click (or CTRL + left click) on Geforce.kext and select "Show Package Contents"
Go into the Contents Folder
Open up the Info.plist
Scroll down and look for the following entry:
<key>IOPCIMatch</key> <string>0x000010de&0x0000ffff</string>
Here we see "10de" again being NVidia's Vendor ID, the 0000ffff defines a device search range, don't worry about this since we don't need it you'll see this coming up in the other kext we have to edit in larger numbers. Assuming you have an Geforce 7950 replace it with the following
<key>IOPCIMatch</key> <string>0x029510de</string>
As you can see with the Device ID + Vendor ID we aquired earlier we have our own magic string now. So effectively we're retargeting the kexts specifically to a device instead of letting leopard do any guess work. 1 down 2 more to go.
And Save.
- NVDANV40HAL.kext -
Right Click (or CTRL + left click) on NVDANV40HAL.kext and select "Show Package Contents"
Go into the Contents Folder
Open up the Info.plist
Scroll down and look for the following entry:
<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> <string>0x004010de&0xfff0ffff 0x00f010de&0xfff0f fff 0x022010de&0xfff0ffff 0x014010de&0xfff0ffff 0x016010de&0xfff0fff f 0x009010de&0xfff0ffff 0x01d010de&0xfff0ffff 0x039010de&0xfff0ffff 0x029010de&0xfff0ffff</string>
As you can see NV40 targets a wide range of cards. replace all of this with your magic string so it looks like this. Once again the ID you see is for my 7950.
<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> <string>0x029510de</string>
And Save.
- NVDAResman.kext -
Right Click (or CTRL + left click) on NVDARedman.kext and select "Show Package Contents"
Go into the Contents Folder
Open up the Info.plist
Scroll down and look for the following entry:
<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> <string>0x011010de&0xfff8ffff 0x017010de&0xfff8f fff 0x017910de 0x018010de&0xfff8ffff 0x018810de 0x018910de 0x020010de&0x fff8ffff 0x025010de&0xfff8ffff 0x028010de&0xfff8ffff 0x030010de&0xff f8ffff 0x031010de&0xfff8ffff 0x031910de 0x034910de</string>
Again we're going to trim it down. Put your own magic string in place.
<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key> <string>0x029510de</string>
And Save.
- Taking the path less travelled -
Now we need to make sure that OS X will initialize the kexts right. Open up Terminal.app found in /Applications/Utilities/
Proceed with the following set of commands one by one, ignore the line with the # in front of it.
sudo -s #Give it your account password for root cd /System/Library/Extensions chmod -R 755 * && chown -R root:wheel * cd .. rm -r Extensions.mkext kextcache -a i386 -e
Type exit and close the Terminal.
Now reboot and start hitting F8 furiously so you can change the darwin bootloader.
Now boot your Leopard with -f -v -legacy
- Do I see clearly now the rain has gone ? -
If all is right and your back in OS X you should have a transparant menu bar and if you go into System Preferences > Screen Saver. You should now see Arabesque / Shell / RSS and a host of others pop up (since these run via Core Animation which only works when QE / CI is supported). You should also have full ability to change your resolution and also use multiple displays if your card supports it.
See screenshot here for my current setup running in 1600x1200 perfectly. Screenie
- My glasses... Where are my Glasses! -
So you've gone thru all the effort and still no luck ? here are some pointers to look at.
Make sure your using a recent monitor that supports EDID (some monitors need this turned on manually). This is a system that will tell OS X what kind of monitor you have so it knows what resolutions and settings it can use.
Make sure your using a normal D-SUB (VGA) cable or DVI if your using a LCD panel.
Make sure you have no weird adapters in your video chain. In my particular case I had an old Apple BNC video cable hooked to a Mac > VGA converter and then again into a VGA > DVI plug onto my card. Suffice to say EDID does NOT travel over BNC
Make sure you didn't kill the XML syntax <blah> and </blah> see how things are defined, opened, and closed ?
If you've never used your card under Tiger or Leopard and it's a 512MB model, Read up on NVinject's rom modding (Not for the weak of heart) so it's compatible with the Darwin Bootloader
If your card works under Tiger, double check you've got your Vendor ID + Device ID combo right, it's easy to mistype afterall.
Should you find yourself completely locked up and ending up in a kernel panic. Boot up OS X with -s -legacy after it's done you should see -sh3.0#
Proceed as follows:
mount -uw / mkdir /ExtOff/ mv /System/Library/Extensions/NVDAResman.kext /ExtOff/ rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/Extensions.mkext cd / shutdown -r now
Your machine will now reboot and will switch back to framebuffer mode as Geforce.kext and NV40 are depended on NVresman to bring everything up to fullspeed.
Should you still KP then try booting with -f -v -legacy
- I find your lack of faith disturbing... -
If all above fails, there's a chance you may fail at being a noob or do not posess the patience to read something thru.
(Of course I'm willing to except that I've overlooked something I'm human afterall. So they say atleast.
Sincerely Yours,
Maci
