Learning the internals of OS X is perfectly Ok, but that's not the matter here. I think the continuous pursuance of asking/hoping/trying to obtain full graphics acceleration on GMA950/X3100 obsolete GPUs with Mav and now Yos is sheer stupidity.
It's been obvious for 2 over years (we're not talking of a few weeks or a few months here but 2years+) that it would never work, still people start or extend lengthy threads about this same old thing on and on. How many more years and OS X versions will people need before they actually understand?
And as you wrote in a post one year old people has the right to see with their own eyes (sorry, not stalking you. But anytime I looked for "GMA 950 Yosemite" I've found a post of yours). Correct?
What instead I find annoying is that you have been a long time in this kind of threads trying to persuade people that Mavericks couldn't run on these old system because of the lack of HW acceleration, as you wrote in the post previous to the one I just mentioned.
Simply put that statement was wrong. Mavericks runs mostly fine on my MacBook with GMA 950. But it is unstable due to some bugs in WindowServer/Graphics Core, triggered more often by the (untested by Apple on these OS X versions) 10.6.2 64 bits kexts. Which makes it not stable enough for me. Yosemite instead runs even better. The worst issues I've got until now have been two Kernel Panics caused by an LG smartphone connected via USB. Actually disconnecting it. Which makes me wonder what's the USB situation with the Hackintoshes at this point..
Not only that. Yesterday I installed Yosemite in the (supported) MacBook Pro of my brother in law. The graphics was slightly faster, it obviously had Vibrancy (although MC and Launchpad do have Vibrancy, so I don't understand what's the big deal with Apple disabling it in the main interface when without HW acceleration) but apart from that I didn't feel much difference. Actually my ghetto's White MB was even generally faster. Maybe because I have an hybrid HDD at 7200rpm, while he is stuck with a 5400rpm HDD.
I could even test Airdrop. With my surprise it worked! We obviously were in the same LAN, I didn't check otherwise, but it did.
My OSXL thread was a quick attempt to show people that if apparent success can be achieved in 64bit Snow Leopard, it is:
a) partial
b) limited to SL
Those facts being established, one could hope that people would finally realise the futility of envisaging success in reaching GMA950/X3100 graphics acceleration with Mav or Yos. This will never happen.
You may choose to run Yos your GMA system without QE/CI but I'm sure you know you're a rather rare breed to that effect. People want the real stuff, not limping mode.
Oh, don't get me wrong. Your OSXL thread was good. Very detailed. It's just that I don't understand why there you said that one needs to replace the OpenGL/OpenCL frameworks, here you replied to me that even 10.6.8 works just with the 64 bits kexts.
Still, regarding the futility, I find it more futile to continue to threat people like a bunch of morons because we like to experiments with the HW we have available. Especially when even without HW acceleration my unsupported MacBook is more productive with Yosemite than with Lion. And FASTER in the general operations.
Because I don't know if you followed it, but there has been a gazillion pages discussion in the Apple's forum about Lion and its memory problems. The largest discussion, because there were at least another two popular ones. The RAM compression which started with Mavericks for old Macs is a savior. And not only that. I opened a bug report with Apple because since 10.7.0 the OS virtual memory was thrashing. And it really was. Just after starting Safari I could get a backing store of 5-6GB, with the OS stuck for minutes until it wrote down all of it. In 10.7.5 the situation was somehow improved, but not fixed. I thought Apple forgot about it until one day I received an e-mail stating that the bug was fixed in.. 10.9.2!!
Now you are well aware that the lack of RAM can (and does) hit the performances much more than having a weak GPU (just look at that awful Lagdroid). The largest backing store I've got with Yosemite has been 2.5GB. With a number of applications I couldn't even imagine to run in Lion. 2.5GB that went down to 500MB or so after closing the memory hogging apps. With Lion I kept (past tense because I didn't touch that junk in few days) getting a backing store of 4-5 and again 6GB. And there it stayed no matter what I closed.
Thus for
my needs from an general operational point of view Yosemite in my unsupported MacBook is much better than Lion. I tried ML 64 bits when it came out, but I was using the wrong kexts, thus it was quite unusable (that bluish look drives me mad) other than slow and so I gave up and I stuck with Lion. I gave it a try to 10.8.5 with MLPostfactor in a partitioned USB disk few weeks ago just for the heck of it. It looked good, but the WiFi wasn't working fine, neither the Bluetooth. I installed Mavericks 10.9.4, then upgraded to to 10.9.5. It was working fine as I wrote, but the WindowServer was crashing. Then finally I installed Yosemite GM in the last partition. God! It did work! I moved it to the second partition in my internal HDD and booted from it since then. Never a major issue, at least apparently not related to the unsupported HW.
There are thousands of people installing much more unstable custom ROMs (yeah, Cyanomodgen, I am looking at you. Although you are not alone) and/or kernels in their expensive mobile phones. Happily ignoring that the WiFi may not work, the Bluetooth is like non existent, it gets random reboots. But hey! It's overclocked! Here we are installing a vanilla kernel/OS with just a custom boot.efi and two unsupported (and likely a bit buggy) graphics kexts. Sorry if Yosemite works
much better in my MacBook than any Cyanogenmod I tested in my phones. And better than Lion, sure. Now, who's the fool?
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