Upgrading my Hackintosh from Catalina to Big Sur, and from Clover to OpenCore

November 14, 2020

So this is that exciting time of the year where Apple releases a new macOS version. Upgrading to Big Sur was the perfect opportunity for me to start my Hackintosh from a clean slate, and use a different bootloader.

So far, I’ve been using Clover, first on High Sierra, then I switched my unsupported NVIDIA graphic card to a supported AMD one in order to upgrade to Catalina

One month later, I’m here again, upgrading to Big Sur. I tried upgrading Clover first, like the last time for Catalina (where the upgrade was nearly seamless) but this time I realized that they made some changes that would require me to update my current configuration in order for it to work.

So I figured if I had to configure something, it might as well be OpenCore.

Why OpenCore?

If I was to make a comparison, I would say that OpenCore is to Clover what Arch is to Ubuntu.

In the way that with Clover, like with Ubuntu, you don’t need to know a lot to have it working, which is convenient and was great for me to get started with Hackintoshes. I could just use Clover installer and tick more or less randomly stuff there based on stuff I read online, and then do the same thing with MultiBeast, tweak a couple things with Clover Configurator and that would get the job done.

I’m not saying that it was easy, far from it, it took a lot of effort to get to the proper configuration of all of those tools in order for my Hackintosh to work, but I didn’t have to really understand much, it was more a matter of trial and error, and patience.

The downside to this approach though, is that when something doesn’t work, or when something breaks, well since you don’t know much about what’s going on, you’re kinda fucked.

And I don’t blame Clover for this, FWIW you can learn the underlying details of Clover, and maybe avoid using MultiBeast and so on, but I find that harder when the seemingly “easy” option is right there under my nose, and it seems to be the most encouraged way.

With OpenCore, like with Arch, the main, recommended way (and maybe the only way) is to take a deep breath, and follow a detailed manual on how to install and configure everything yourself, in a mostly manual way. But they make that easier as far as learning is concerned by being smaller and simpler systems to understand!

In other words, you don’t need to learn a lot about Ubuntu or Clover to get them to work but if you were to want to learn them, that would be a massive task as they’re such complex systems (which is a side product of being easy to use without learning). But while you need to learn how Arch and OpenCore work to get them running, that also makes them much easier to learn by being far less complex.

OpenCore required me to learn a lot on how Hackintoshes work, as well as about devices, chipsets, firmwares in general, and how macOS deal with those.

The OpenCore install guide is amazing at teaching everything that you need to understand, especially they not only tell you what to do, but why you do it, and thanks to it, I could install and configure only the things that I really needed for my particular system to work. I know everything that’s there because I was required to put it there myself, and I know everything that was changed in the configuration because I had to configure it myself.

This means that if something breaks, it’s going to be easier to identify, because I know precisely what parts are there, and what’s their purpose, since I was required to make the decision for myself to put them there. And there’s less parts overall because I added only the ones I need! Obviously it’s easier finding an issue in a handful of parts that you know, rather than in a fuckton of parts that you have no clue what they do and what put it there.

Now that I told you why I’m interested to move to OpenCore, here’s how I did it. And it was much easier than I expected.

Installing macOS Big Sur with OpenCore and the issues I encountered

First, here’s the relevant details of my machine:

Motherboard
MSI H110M PRO-D (RTL8111H Ethernet chipset, Realtek ALC887 audio chipset)
CPU
Intel Core i5-6500 Skylake
Wi-Fi card
TP-Link TL-WDN4800 N900 (Atheros AR9380 chipset)

I followed the guide, so as instructed for my specific system, I:

Note: I would also have needed to add USBInjectAll, but I didn’t at that point because the guide said it shouldn’t be needed for desktop Skylake and newer. It turned out I needed it at least until I build the USB map for my machine.

Then I configured my config.plist from Sample.plist using the desktop Skylake guide and ProperTree downloaded earlier, which means I:

Note: I later had to change SecureBootModel to Disabled, more on that below.

I also made sure that my BIOS settings matched the recommended ones in the guide, which they already did.

Then I booted my OpenCore USB and launched the installer “Install macOS Big Sur (External)”.

Waiting on IOProviderClass IOResourceMatch boot-uuid-media

The first issue I encountered is this message in the logs when launching the installer. It turns out the installer wasn’t able to detect the USB key it was booting from and got stuck there, eventually crashing.

I solved that by adding the USBInjectAll kext, which allowed me to continue booting.

disk5: device is write locked

I got a bunch of those messages during the boot after I fixed the USB issue, and it was hanging for a while on those, so I figured something was wrong and I shut down the computer and started looking up for solutions. It turns out nothing was wrong and I just needed to be patient.

It eventually kept logging more stuff and booted to the installer UI.

Can’t find my SATA drives in the macOS installer

Everything seems fine, until I want to pick the drive to install to and there’s like all my USB drives but not my HDD nor SSD (both are plugged in SATA).

I spend a while to figure that issue, there’s a couple threads online with a similar issue, some answers that recommend to disable Intel Rapid Storage Technology (which I don’t have), others recommending to use the SATA-Unsupported kext (that didn’t work either).

In the end, I stumbled upon Dortania’s Big Sur specific guide (which was actually part of the “extras” of the guide I was reading but I didn’t notice before), where it explains that Big Sur dropped “certain SATA controllers”, and it seemed that mine was.

They recommend using Catalina’s AppleAHCIPort.kext with any conflicting symbols patched, which they actually provide an already patched file for (thanks Dortania, much appreciated).

That allowed me to see my SATA drives and I could keep on with the installation.

Booting on “macOS Installer” just reboots into recovery

The installation keeps on going, until it reboots. This is usual, and normally that’s where you boot from “macOS Installer” on the actual system drive rather than “Install macOS Big Sur” from the USB drive, and it keeps going from there.

Here, it didn’t keep going, it just rebooted, forcing me into recovery (it somehow bypassed the OpenCore menu where I can choose what to boot from and would always go to recovery).

There was only like 10 lines of log before it reboots, and it was so fast I couldn’t read them.

That’s where the OpenCore setting earlier that generates text logs on the EFI partition was handy AF, since it read clearly at the end of the logs:

#[EB.LD.OFS|OPEN!] Err(0xE) <"\\macOS Install Data\\Locked Files\\BootKernelExtensions.kc.j137ap.im4m">

That allowed me to Google a bit further, and I somehow found this thread among others that suggested disabling secure boot (by setting SecureBootModel to Disabled in config.plist).

This worked and the installer kept doing its thing until I get to the setup screen!

No Wi-Fi on Big Sur

I go through the setup, but when it’s time to connect the network, I realize I don’t have the option to connect Wi-Fi. I expected that as the guide said in the beginning I would need an Ethernet connection, that said I kinda challenged that as I remember I could install macOS High Sierra using Wi-Fi back then.

Well, it turns out that Mojave dropped support for my Wi-Fi chipset (Atheros AR9380), and I already had that problem when I moved from High Sierra to Catalina, where I had to replace /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext by the one from my old High Sierra installation, which I could easily do by remounting the system partition as read-write using sudo mount -uw /.

This wasn’t possible anymore as even my root user was denied this command.

Again Dortania’s guide came in handy, mentioning a workaround to patch that kext so that it doesn’t conflict with the system version, and still be able to load it from OpenCore! And even better, there’s a repo with already patched kexts of previous macOS versions!

So I get the High Sierra one, and that works!

It works actually so well that my Wi-Fi network is automatically connected, like WTF bro, ur not supposed to do that, I never entered my passphrase.

I investigated a bit, and in Keychain Access, it wasn’t actually my passphrase stored, but a 64 digits hexadecimal string.

Well today, I learnt that WPA2 derives a PBKDF2 key from the SSID and passphrase in order to connect, and that macOS stores that key in NVRAM (which I now know what it is thanks to the OpenCore guide), which is how my new totally unrelated installation of Big Sur was able to automatically connect to my Wi-Fi network.

Post-install

The last step was to follow the OpenCore post-install guide.

Seems that mostly everything I need worked out of the box so I didn’t have much to fix there, I just copied OpenCore’s EFI from the USB to my SSD instead, and then the main thing was to generate the USB map to avoid using USBInjectAll and the XhciPortLimit quirk, as well as some cosmetic tweaks.

Generating the USB map

I’m not gonna go in the details of why this needs to be done as the guide does one more time an amazing job at that, but this turned out much easier than I expected.

Since I have an Intel system, I could use the USBMap tool and basically just plug something in all my USB ports (not even necessarily at the same time), and it would figure all the ones that were used. Then I marked the ones that were USB 2.0 as opposed to 3.0, and it generated a map of just those ports under the form of a kext.

That’s literally all that I had to do, and I could indeed remove USBInjectAll and set the XhciPortLimit quirk to False and everything worked.

Cosmetic tweaks

Finally I followed the guide’s beauty treatment, which meant I:

Finally I had to add the display patch to force my screen in RBG mode, but I couldn’t do it by modifying /System/Library/Displays as the /System directory is immutable, but I learnt that you can do the same thing in /Library/Displays and it just works!

Wrapping up

And that’s it, a working Big Sur installation using OpenCore for the first time!

I spent basically a whole day on it, and looking back at it, it’s surprising how straightforward it was and how well it worked.

Sure there’s a lot of little steps and different tools to use for very specific parts, but it’s also very clear what everything does and why we do it (thanks to the guide).

At the end of the day, the biggest part was to figure precisely the parts specific to my system, mainly the fact that Big Sur dropped support for my SATA controller and that my Wi-Fi chipset was unsupported since Mojave, and the fixes for those.

Now I know that, and especially now I have the SSDTs and USB map done, using OpenCore and hopefully upgrading to future versions will be even smoother… at least until macOS drops support for another one of my chipsets!

I’m also amazed by the fact that all of this works without requiring any patching of the macOS installation, everything is contained in the OpenCore EFI partition, and the macOS system itself is 100% stock.

Upgrading (2021 edit)

Just a quick edit to note that I’ve since then been able to apply all Big Sur updates normally, without any issue.

While it’s usually recommended to update OpenCore as well as your kexts before doing updates, I didn’t bother doing so and it always worked flawlessly so far. I can just let macOS reboot into update mode and let it do its thing, it reboots a couple of times and always pick the right boot option by default to get successful updates.

I will upgrade OpenCore and the kexts for the next major release, if I don’t run into an issue until then.

Note: Monterey was recently released, read my upgrade notes here!

Thanks

I would also like to thank the Dortania team for their fabulous guide. I learnt so much while installing Big Sur with OpenCore and I’m still impressed at how well everything was explained and how detailed the explanations were.

Also thanks to everybody who contributed to all the tools I mentioned in this post, those tools all felt really solid and far from “hacks” that I would expect for something we call Hackintosh, everything seemed cleanly built, well maintained and documented, with proper GitHub releases and everything, including prebuilt/prepatched options. Like I would say in French, c’est vraiment bien branlé.

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