I225-V stopped working on Catalina - kernel panic

[cpws]

Hi,

 

My hackintosh is built on an ASUS ROG Strix Z490-E, which uses the I225-V (2) ethernet controller. It has been happily running on Catalina for 1.5 years now, with the usual DeviceProperties PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1C,0x4)/Pci(0x0,0x0) and corresponding Kernel Patch entries. Sometimes (rarely) it seemed the connection dropped, but quickly came back. A couple of times the port stopped working completely until I dis- and reconnected the cable. But overall, everything worked well.

 

After the second-to-last Catalina security update, it started to randomly throw a kernel panic during the startup sequence. I proceeded to update the BIOS to the latest version, which did not change much. Lately, these panics have increased in frequency, and as of yesterday, I cannot boot the system at all anymore. The kernel panic comes from the AppleIntelI210Ethernet driver and looks just like the one you get if you have the wrong DeviceProperties entry (see attachment). But the PCI path is definitely correct and it had worked all the time before... I have since tried to update / re-write the I225 firmware (because it says NVM checksum incorrect right before the KP), reset the NVRAM, use the SSDT table meant for fixing issues with later versions, and update OpenCore and all Kexts. To no avail, the only way I can boot Catalina is by removing the I225-specific stuff and enabling the WiFi Kexts instead (to have internet).

Both in Linux and Windows 10 the I225 still runs without any issues at all.

 

I have to say I'm out if ideas, and interestingly didn't find anyone with that issue in the various forums so far... My guess would have been that Apple changed the driver and it doesn't accept the adapter anymore, but then it would stop working for everyone on Catalina. Or has every single one moved to newer versions...? If my hardware was faulty, then it's weird that it works flawlessly in the other OSs.

 

Anyone got any ideas how to further dig into this? Ideally, I'd like to get this working again instead of having to install a newer OS version (without guarantee that this would fix it) or buying a separate network card...

 

Thanks for any hints and ideas!

Chris