macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[jbiser361]

maybe it might be a possibility for our older GPU's

ok, in what language would it be written in, and is there like a template for it?

 

[TimothyR734]

ok, in what language would it be written in, and is there like a template for it?

That I really don't know I am not an expert in this area

 

[pkouame]

yikes, ok, is there anyway i can get my hands on the framework for the SkyLight and CoreDisplag framework?
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do we really need sidecars though, can’t we just take that code out?

It’s not sidecar per se but the underlying support for these new features built into a multitude of Catalina frameworks + apple actually dropping support for our machines. Up until Catalina Apple deprecated a lot, but remnants were actually left hanging around allowing us to play. It’s just much harder now.

 

[TimothyR734]

oh ok, doesn’t nVidia supply webDrivers for their video cards?

so wouldn’t that help with the Metal Capability?

http://www.macvidcards.com/drivers.html that is some info on the Nvidia web drivers for the macOS versions so far I go Cuda 7.0.29 to work on my iMac 9,1

 

[israelmena59]

Puedo instalar catalina macos desde macbookpro 8.1 parcheado directamente desde ota

 

[pkouame]

Unfortunately not for Nvidia Tesla series, but Metal is a different framework from OpenGL, uses different Acceleration drivers (but OpenCL is still there) even if I guess OpenGL is not totally abandoned by apple in Catalina, I mean they still need it.

Yup they are still linked for a reason.

 

[Verticleman76]

So new on here. Can't wait for a patcher to com out for 10.15 and take it for a test drive. Any progress on the patcher as of yet?

 

[TimothyR734]

Cuda driver 7.5.30 working hope this is helpful info

 

[dosdude1]

Yup they are still linked for a reason.

As far as I can tell, the only reason the OpenGL/CL FWs are still in Catalina at this point is to provide compatibility for older Mac apps and games that utilize OpenGL instead of Metal.

 

[hadnet]

Alright, so for those who were wondering, myself and @parrotgeek1 have been working on this acceleration issue on our own, and have come to the conclusion that it is not going to be possible to achieve graphics acceleration on non-Metal video cards in Catalina. This is for various reasons, but the main one is the SkyLight and CoreDisplay dependencies. In Catalina, SkyLight and CoreDisplay have been changed greatly, and are interdependent on each other. Meaning, if you replace one from an older version of macOS, you must replace the other, otherwise you'll be left with a ton of unresolved symbols. The problem with doing this, though, Catalina's AppKit relies on all the new functions present in the Catalina CoreDisplay framework. You cannot use a copy of AppKit from an older macOS version, without causing a ton more unresolved symbols.

TLDR, based on this analysis, non-Metal GPU acceleration is not, and will not be possible on 10.15 Catalina. With that said, I will not be releasing the "usual" patcher for 10.15. I do not believe the general public should be using a copy of macOS without full graphics acceleration (I sure as heck know I wouldn't want to), and I'm not going to release a patch that results in extremely poor system performance for the end user (not to mention I would get thousands of complaints per day about it if I did).

I will, however, more than likely make somewhat of a "cut down" patch, designed for use only on Mac Pro systems and some iMacs that have had their video cards upgraded.

I'm as disappointed as you all are about this discovery, and deeply apologize I won't be able to provide a patcher because of it.

I have an iMac 21.5 mid 2011 with a GTX 765m 2GB upgrade running Mojave just perfectly, so this Catalina "cut down" patcher will work on my iMac right?

 

[pkouame]

That I really don't know I am not an expert in this area

usually C/C++

 

[TimothyR734]

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/22/macos-10-15-api-device-drivers/ maybe someone might find this article interesting

 

[pkouame]

I’m using dd to create a block level clone of my Catalina install. It involves having both disks unmounted with

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

So to do this I used the Terminal in a USB Installer.

Use:

diskutil list to find the right disks

Double check. Then patiently run:

dd if=/dev/disk# of=/dev/disk# bs=1m

if is in, of is out. Do not get the in file and out file mixed up or you will completely erase your install.

You can backup and restore to disk image as well. And you should be able to restore from disk utility’s GUI. Jury still out on this one.

I may write a GUI front end for this and it could be added to a patch tool. Showing progress would be the only challenge.

Just following up on my (failed) attempts at hand crafting a Catalina boot partition. Seems like the CCC and SuperDuper! guys are also hard at work supporting Catalina. So not just me, the new file system layout and "hidden" volumes are providing challenges for even the experts. But they will crack this within a weeks/months - definitely before Catalina release.

The separate Data volume is especially tricky - I just added the volume and rsynch'ed the data - but someone posits that you can't just add the Data volume to a system boot partition (like I did). It's the other way around. Doesn't make sense to me but read here: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/06/06/backing-up-macos-10-15-beta/#comments

 

[Verticleman76]

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/04/22/macos-10-15-api-device-drivers/ maybe someone might find this article interesting

I'm running a iMac 11,1 late 2009 with ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB. Thinking it won't work?

 

[jackluke]

http://www.macvidcards.com/drivers.html that is some info on the Nvidia web drivers for the macOS versions so far I go Cuda 7.0.29 to work on my iMac 9,1

Even if also Catalina allows to install higher CUDA versions, the only working latest CUDA framework driver for Nvidia Tesla is this: https://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cuda-6.5.51-driver.html

You have an Nvidia 9400M that is Nvidia Tesla, so use that driver if you want to add a real CUDA compute.

edit: You're on Mojave, but the same applies.

 

[TimothyR734]

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-can-no-longer-reboot-memory-issues.2184962/ this could be another issue as well

 

[jackluke]

As far as I can tell, the only reason the OpenGL/CL FWs are still in Catalina at this point is to provide compatibility for older Mac apps and games that utilize OpenGL instead of Metal.

Yes, during WWDC they showed a demo of Asphalt 8 (or 9) that was first game full Metal based, so they surely kept also for those reasons, more compatibility.

 

[TimothyR734]

Yes, during WWDC they showed a demo of Asphalt 8 (or 9) that was first game full Metal based, so they surely kept also for those reasons, more compatibility.

I think a 3rd of WWDC was talking about the newer games coming soon very little time about macOS the most part was hyping iPhones and iOS 13

 

[jackluke]

Just following up on my (failed) attempts at hand crafting a Catalina boot partition. Seems like the CCC and SuperDuper! guys are also hard at work supporting Catalina. So not just me, the new file system layout and "hidden" volumes are providing challenges for even the experts. But they will crack this within a weeks/months - definitely before Catalina release.

The separate Data volume is especially tricky - I just added the volume and rsynch'ed the data - but someone posits that you can't just add the Data volume to a system boot partition (like I did). It's the other way around. Doesn't make sense to me but read here: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/06/06/backing-up-macos-10-15-beta/#comments

AFAIK not even DiskUtility has always properly worked to clone an APFS container, I often got failed in "Inverting Target Volume", on a supported machine, but somehow I managed to fix it manually.

 

[pkouame]

AFAIK not even DiskUtility has always properly worked to clone an APFS container, I often got failed in "Inverting Target Volume", on a supported machine, but somehow I managed to fix it manually.

Yeah gave up on DU a while ago also. Used to be able to manually set up an APFS boot on Mojave with ease. Cat seems a little more complex... I have Cat on external for the moment. Would like to clone that to my internal disk... otherwise experimenting and exploring is slow and time consuming...
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As far as I can tell, the only reason the OpenGL/CL FWs are still in Catalina at this point is to provide compatibility for older Mac apps and games that utilize OpenGL instead of Metal.

Yup. Haven’t had a chance to inspect Skylight and other frameworks yet, but have they stripped out some of the old embedded OpenGL shader code that was still hanging around?

 

[i.am.not.a.hipster]

macOS Catalina runs great and very smooth on MacPro5,1. No need to patch or upgrade.

You just need to do these 3 simple steps for the MacPro5,1 to run macOS Catalina:

(1) install macOS Catalina on a drive on a supported Mac

(2) boot your MacPro5,1 to recovery, and then in terminal, type:

nvram boot-args="-no_compat_check"

(3) transfer the drive with macOS Catalina installed to the MacPro5,1 and then boot. The MacPro5,1 will now boot up macOS Catalina.

 

[pkouame]

macOS Catalina runs great and very smooth on MacPro5,1. No need to patch or upgrade.

You just need to do these 3 simple steps for the MacPro5,1 to run macOS Catalina:

(1) install macOS Catalina on a drive on a supported Mac

(2) boot your MacPro5,1 to recovery, and then in terminal, type

sudo nvram boot-args="-no_compat_check"

(3) transfer the drive with macOS Catalina installed to the MacPro5,1 and and boot. The MacPro5,1 will now boot up macOS Catalina.

That’s cool. Wondering if the software update hack will still work in Cat - so you can avoid the supported Mac dance when an update comes out (next week?)

 

[Pinarek]

Is there a solution to the following problem:

When I try to install Beta1 on an unsupported MacBook Pro 5.2 for 10.15 the mediation comes:
a firmware update is needed to uninstall Catalina.

I have tried this with a normal installation, since there is no Catalina patcher available from Dosdude1.

 

[saudor]

Alright, so for those who were wondering, myself and @parrotgeek1 have been working on this acceleration issue on our own, and have come to the conclusion that it is not going to be possible to achieve graphics acceleration on non-Metal video cards in Catalina. This is for various reasons, but the main one is the SkyLight and CoreDisplay dependencies. In Catalina, SkyLight and CoreDisplay have been changed greatly, and are interdependent on each other. Meaning, if you replace one from an older version of macOS, you must replace the other, otherwise you'll be left with a ton of unresolved symbols. The problem with doing this, though, Catalina's AppKit relies on all the new functions present in the Catalina CoreDisplay framework. You cannot use a copy of AppKit from an older macOS version, without causing a ton more unresolved symbols.

TLDR, based on this analysis, non-Metal GPU acceleration is not, and will not be possible on 10.15 Catalina. With that said, I will not be releasing the "usual" patcher for 10.15. I do not believe the general public should be using a copy of macOS without full graphics acceleration (I sure as heck know I wouldn't want to), and I'm not going to release a patch that results in extremely poor system performance for the end user (not to mention I would get thousands of complaints per day about it if I did).

I will, however, more than likely make somewhat of a "cut down" patch, designed for use only on Mac Pro systems and some iMacs that have had their video cards upgraded.

I'm as disappointed as you all are about this discovery, and deeply apologize I won't be able to provide a patcher because of it.

Thanks man for all that you've done. Cat drops way too many stuff that i use like 32 bit, dashboard, no more legacy safari extensions so for me personally, i wouldnt be missing out and id be perfectly content with mojave.

I hope 10.14.6 will be stable since so far 10.14.5 chews up memory and makes the whole system slow even on a clean install

 

[Starplayr]

I'm back on 'dd' disk doubler or whatever the dd unix utility is actually called.

This time I am writing to a diskimage of a fresh install and stopping after x number of bytes.

The exact number of bytes are calculated.

Then I plan to restore that image to a disk with either Disk Utility, diskutil, dd or some other tool.

If it works, I will post the steps used.

I used to have a Darwin disk cloner called CloneTool back when I was with NiceMac. It boot up to Darwin it ran an interactive shell script to clone Master Boot Record volumes for Intel Macs and Hackintosh users. Back then I found a kext that blessed the volumes correctly and it was found in one of Apple's installers. I am sure that find is child's play these days but back when the Developer Intel Macs were around, it was pretty awesome. I did get chance to work a little bit with Netkas back then. He helped write an installer for SiriusMac and he also helped with a the GUI version of CloneTool (never released), it was sold to another dev and died on the vine. Those years have come and gone, but working on this stuff again brings back memories.