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Mac Pro 3.1 and VEGA FE (10.13.4)

Pressure

Pressure

macrumors 603
Original poster
May 30, 2006
5,230
1,613
Denmark
Hi fellow 'rumors,

After reading all about the exciting bootrom hacking and trying out dosdude1's High Sierra Patcher for older models no longer supported officially I wanted to try installing an AMD Radeon VEGA FRONTIER EDITION in this old, dusty Mac Pro 3.1 and see if I could get an extra year out of it until the fabled, new Mac Pro hits the scene in 2019 (or later).

The good news is that it boots after running the modified High Sierra installation and correctly identifies the graphic card.

Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 13.33.04.png
Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 13.33.21.png

The bad news is that acceleration isn't enabled, so everything is so far a slideshow. Not an optimal experience.

Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 13.34.00.png

Anyone have some pointers or tips I should try to get it up and running and usable?

UPDATE:

Seems the problem is related to the AMDRadeonX5000.kext, which were modified during installation (had a Radeon 5870 installed prior) with the High Sierra Patcher from dosdude1.

Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 14.23.55.png
 
Last edited:
Not sure what you mean by acceleration not enabled? The Vega FE is supported by 10.13.5 in the cMP 5,1, shouldn’t it be as well in the 3,1?
 
Pressure said:
Hardware acceleration. Unfortunately no.
Click to expand...

Depends on the software, no? Does the software use OpenGL or Metal to fully take advantage of the GPU?

No, if you're thinking of some features provided by Windows AMD drivers. Neither Apple nor AMD is interested in these features for macOS.
 
Can anyone upload their AMDRadeonX5000.kext from /System/Library/Extensions (10.13.4 or 10.13.5) ?
 
rotarypower101 said:
Will 3,1 likely be compatible with Mohave with dosdude1 patcher?

Or are the changes with the graphics cards or any other requirements a problem?
Click to expand...

You need a graphic card compatible with Metal as the bare minimum, so we are looking at Radeon HD 7850+.
[doublepost=1529488952][/doublepost]Clean and patched installation of 10.13.5 gives me following error when booting in verbose mode.

All signs point to a graphic card driver problem with the following error:

IMG_0942.jpg
gIOScreenLockState 3, hs 0, bs 0, now 8, sm 0x0.

Will boot fine in safe mode and as soon as I remove my VEGA FRONTIER EDITION.

So it appears no VEGA for the Mac Pro 3.1 (Early 2008), yet.
 
Pressure said:
So the High Sierra AMD driver require SSE4.2, which Harpertown doesn’t support.
Click to expand...

Is that the case?

I use qemu with -cpu Penryn with KVM, as far as I know Penryn only supports SSE4.1 not 4.2.

My RX580 works just fine, tho I did have to patch the AMD frame buffer with the correct port routings.

It could be that my host cpu, Ryzen 7 1700, supports SSE4.2 and KVM is passing that to the guest, but I don't think that is the case.

42214863974_6519ea0c86_b.jpg


Code: 
sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu
machdep.cpu.max_basic: 13
machdep.cpu.max_ext: 2147483656
machdep.cpu.vendor: GenuineIntel
machdep.cpu.brand_string: Intel Core 2 Duo P9xxx (Penryn Class Core 2)
machdep.cpu.family: 6
machdep.cpu.model: 23
machdep.cpu.extmodel: 1
machdep.cpu.extfamily: 0
machdep.cpu.stepping: 3
machdep.cpu.feature_bits: 11396396245146401791
machdep.cpu.extfeature_bits: 4832889088
machdep.cpu.signature: 67187
machdep.cpu.brand: 0
machdep.cpu.features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 HTT SSE3 SSSE3 CX16 SSE4.1 x2APIC AES VMM XSAVE OSXSAVE AVX1.0
machdep.cpu.extfeatures: SYSCALL XD EM64T LAHF TSCI
machdep.cpu.logical_per_package: 8
machdep.cpu.cores_per_package: 8
machdep.cpu.microcode_version: 0
machdep.cpu.processor_flag: 0
machdep.cpu.mwait.linesize_min: 0
machdep.cpu.mwait.linesize_max: 0
machdep.cpu.mwait.extensions: 3
machdep.cpu.mwait.sub_Cstates: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.sensor: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.dynamic_acceleration: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.invariant_APIC_timer: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.thresholds: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.ACNT_MCNT: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.core_power_limits: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.fine_grain_clock_mod: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.package_thermal_intr: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.hardware_feedback: 0
machdep.cpu.thermal.energy_policy: 0
machdep.cpu.xsave.extended_state: 7 832 832 0
machdep.cpu.xsave.extended_state1: 1 0 0 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.version: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.number: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.width: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.events_number: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.events: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.fixed_number: 0
machdep.cpu.arch_perf.fixed_width: 0
machdep.cpu.cache.linesize: 64
machdep.cpu.cache.L2_associativity: 16

When I boot native on this system, with a patched kernel for AMD, I don't have to patch the AMD frame buffer, all the port routings are correct.

We need to investigate this further, I should have a MP3,1 soon, so we can get to the bottom of this.
 
Last edited:
DearthnVader said:
Don't use the older AMD drivers, they don't support newer AMD cards. See if booting just leads to a black/blank screen, suggesting that it's really the AMD frame buffer that needs to be patched.
Click to expand...

When booting it initializes the VEGA graphic card after a while (the standard grey screen) but it hangs there with no loading bar or Apple logo.

If booting in verbose mode I get IOScreenStateLock3 error at the end and at some point beforehand it says CPU unsupported.
 
Pressure said:
Perhaps we can use the Intel Software Development Emulator to bypass the SSE4.2 restriction on older hardware and load the AMD graphic drivers.
Click to expand...

Even if it were possible with that tool, you'd be running your whole computer in an emulator which seems like more trouble than it's worth.

(It's not possible though. I don't think that emulator has display output, and it certainly can't talk directly to your GPU.)
 
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