macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[i.am.not.a.hipster]

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?)

Actually, all of my Macs are pro Macs that are from 2010 or earlier, so they are all unsupported in Catalina.

So the question is -- how does one easily install macOS Catalina on a drive, without having a supported Mac?

I skip pass this supported Mac versus unsupported Mac issue by emulating macOS Mojave using QEMU on my other Gentoo linux server, with an AMD graphics card passed through to it to get Metal. In the QEMU instance, I then installed macOS Catalina. On the linux host, the drive is actually a .qcow2 file, which I then convert to raw, and then I just dd the raw file image to an NVME card in linux. I then transfer the NVME card to the MacPro5,1 and boot, and it all just worked.

 

[pkouame]

Actually, all of my Macs are pro Macs that are from 2010 or earlier, so they are all unsupported in Catalina.

So the question is -- how does one easily install macOS Catalina on a drive, without having a supported Mac?

I skip pass this supported Mac versus unsupported Mac issue by emulating macOS Mojave using QEMU on my other Gentoo linux server, with an AMD graphics card passed through to it to get Metal. In the QEMU instance, I then installed macOS Catalina. On the linux host, the drive is actually a .qcow2 file, which I then convert to raw, and then I just dd the raw file image to an NVME card in linux. I then transfer the NVME card to the MacPro5,1 and boot, and it all just worked.

Excellent. A good option for some who don't have a supported Mac available. But you'll still have to perform your Cat updates on the linux server and transfer back to pro. Thanks for sharing.

 

[lunarworks]

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.

Ah, that's a shame. I'll miss out on the new Music app and improvements to Photos, but at least I'll get to keep all the 32-bit Steam games I never play. I'll just consider myself lucky I at least got Mojave. Thanks for the good work.

 

[pkouame]

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

So far I think 10.14.3 is still the cleanest safest option (which reminds me that I better check what's going on in that forum again ... ). Did you mistakenly apply the T2 supplemental? Slowed the machine down considerably for some...
[doublepost=1560038512][/doublepost]

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.

Funny we must have started a dd at the same time. Just dd imaged my Cat stick. Using rdisk it took about 30 minutes for 65GB. I'm zipping the image up to get some space for the new partition and will see if it boots without too much work...will report too.

 

[mhorsley121]

Looks like we shouldn't give up hope though, I mean its only beta 1 and we have it booting on older Macs. Maybe in the future there maybe another method we could get acceleration. Quite amazing seeing such a great team of people work together to try and get this thing working and not giving up on people who either cannot afford a newer Mac or simply don't see the need.

wanna say thank you to dosdude1 and everybody else who works so hard to get patches and everything else sorted.

 

[saudor]

So far I think 10.14.3 is still the cleanest safest option (which reminds me that I better check what's going on in that forum again ... ). Did you mistakenly apply the T2 supplemental? Slowed the machine down considerably for some...
[doublepost=1560038512][/doublepost]
Funny we must have started a dd at the same time. Just dd imaged my Cat stick. Using rdisk it took about 30 minutes for 65GB. I'm zipping the image up to get some space for the new partition and will see if it boots without too much work...will report too.

I actually just installed the february update of 10.14.3 (the one that fixes the group facetime bug) and noticed the slowdowns and memory usage (https://neomallers.com/uploads/mbp62mem1.jpg) . HTOP seems to show kernel_task is using 41% of memory. The January release of 10.14.3 runs fine though (2% memory or something really small)

10.14.5 has that weird glitch where if safari is open and the mouse cursor is inside it, the mouse cursor speed stutters and hangs.

 

[Starplayr]

So far I think 10.14.3 is still the cleanest safest option (which reminds me that I better check what's going on in that forum again ... ). Did you mistakenly apply the T2 supplemental? Slowed the machine down considerably for some...
[doublepost=1560038512][/doublepost]
Funny we must have started a dd at the same time. Just dd imaged my Cat stick. Using rdisk it took about 30 minutes for 65GB. I'm zipping the image up to get some space for the new partition and will see if it boots without too much work...will report too.

I did a fresh install and it's about 30GB. I did a successful Archive to a file but on my Supported Mojave machine it wasn't mountable. But it could still be, anyways did not want to risk it, so I decided to partition the drive and shrink the fresh install volume to the exact size of the data, that way I don't have to run the count= and just let it copy the entire partition and can even leave sparse off. I was out shopping today, so I'm back now to see if dd is good enough. It seems going to a file and restoring it is the best option you can even pipe to a file and go to a disk but keep in mind the disk will have the exact same info as the original so I believe dd to a file is the best option, plus you can keep it on other backup volumes and restore. I don't know what formats dd actually supports. I hosed my Catalina install with dd from disk to disk. So I'm not dd'ing from my 2008 Mac yet, just my supported Mac.

I have not been able to create a good OSInstall.mpkg/distribution file yet. Same signing problems and I can't use one from High Sierra cuz my 2008 is not support on that either.

So here is my OSInstall thought:

decompress the OSInstall mpkg. edit the Distribution file with only 1 edit. recompress the package.

Next comparable the hex values in both files. there will the signing difference and should be able to fine the 1 byte difference or whatever a single character translates and compresses down to.

then I should know where the 1 byte to change is in the signed file. Do this a few times for other unsupported Macs and could end up with an unsupported OSInstall file that's official.
[doublepost=1560040169][/doublepost]

I did a fresh install and it's about 30GB. I did a successful Archive to a file but on my Supported Mojave machine it wasn't mountable. But it could still be, anyways did not want to risk it, so I decided to partition the drive and shrink the fresh install volume to the exact size of the data, that way I don't have to run the count= and just let it copy the entire partition and can even leave sparse off. I was out shopping today, so I'm back now to see if dd is good enough. It seems going to a file and restoring it is the best option you can even pipe to a file and go to a disk but keep in mind the disk will have the exact same info as the original so I believe dd to a file is the best option, plus you can keep it on other backup volumes and restore. I don't know what formats dd actually supports. I hosed my Catalina install with dd from disk to disk. So I'm not dd'ing from my 2008 Mac yet, just my supported Mac.

I have not been able to create a good OSInstall.mpkg/distribution file yet. Same signing problems and I can't use one from High Sierra cuz my 2008 is not support on that either.

So here is my OSInstall thought:

decompress the OSInstall mpkg. edit the Distribution file with only 1 edit. recompress the package.

Next comparable the hex values in both files. there will the signing difference and should be able to fine the 1 byte difference or whatever a single character translates and compresses down to.

then I should know where the 1 byte to change is in the signed file. Do this a few times for other unsupported Macs and could end up with an unsupported OSInstall file that's official.

My second attempt worked and the driver is mountable.

Both volume are mounted.

I noticed both the Data volume and OS volume are nearly size on a fresh install. Pure coincidence.

1. resize disk to just it's size using Disk Utility. Do this by partitioning the disk and make the second partition HFS+. Let Disk Utility shrink the fresh install volume.

What I did in the terminal:

diskutil list

-> find /dev/disk#

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

sudo dd if=/dev/disk3 of=yourDiskFileName.img.dmg.raw bs=4096

-> file will be in your home folder or whatever directory you where in the Terminal

in Finder, remove .raw

double click the dmg, both volumes should mount. If not, it did not do it right. punt. start over.


Screen shots and mounts are from Mojave. Will see if the disk image mounts like a real volume on Catalina and will see if it restores. You should be able to use Disk Utility to restore pending it works with APFS volumes. It does look like we will not be able to use HFS+ anymore. Also Mojave installer 10.14.5 now requires APFS.

So we could have a compressed disk image that anyone could restore with basic things done like removing Telemetry.

and / or

We could make a GUI for this, or automated command line app. It could be a nice Swift or SwiftUI project.
[doublepost=1560041569][/doublepost]

Looks like we shouldn't give up hope though, I mean its only beta 1 and we have it booting on older Macs. Maybe in the future there maybe another method we could get acceleration. Quite amazing seeing such a great team of people work together to try and get this thing working and not giving up on people who either cannot afford a newer Mac or simply don't see the need.

wanna say thank you to dosdude1 and everybody else who works so hard to get patches and everything else sorted.

Last year I sold a supported Mac (2012 Mac mini and its Thunderbolt Display). My 2008 Mac Pro ran circles around it. The 2012 Mac mini was a good box though and part of me wishes I still had it. I do have a 2018 Mac mini in the cloud / swift web server running Perfect. It runs some backend work for one of my iOS Apps. I also a 1 full year of Anka Build for testing. And Parallels Desktop which I might nix it's sub.
[doublepost=1560041816][/doublepost]Looks like we have a big leg up mostly because of Mojave. I don't see how acceleration will work on non-metal GPUs. I may take a plunge and get an a Thunderbolt eGPU case for my 27" iMac 2011. I have an extra EVGA 680 and a Kepler Titan.

My Galaxy GTX 680 is the coolest Kepler card I've scored this yet. It was new in box. Has a cool glowing LED on it. says Kepler on it as well. quiet, dual fan and it runs almost as fast as my Titan only its flashed and my Titan is not. Flashed cards btw only run about 1% faster vs. the same non flashed card despite having twice the channels on MP 3,1. I mainly like have a flashed card again for switching startup drives on the fly.

 

[pkouame]

I did a fresh install and it's about 30GB. I did a successful Archive to a file but on my Supported Mojave machine it wasn't mountable. But it could still be, anyways did not want to risk it, so I decided to partition the drive and shrink the fresh install volume to the exact size of the data, that way I don't have to run the count= and just let it copy the entire partition and can even leave sparse off. I was out shopping today, so I'm back now to see if dd is good enough. It seems going to a file and restoring it is the best option you can even pipe to a file and go to a disk but keep in mind the disk will have the exact same info as the original so I believe dd to a file is the best option, plus you can keep it on other backup volumes and restore. I don't know what formats dd actually supports. I hosed my Catalina install with dd from disk to disk. So I'm not dd'ing from my 2008 Mac yet, just my supported Mac.

I have not been able to create a good OSInstall.mpkg/distribution file yet. Same signing problems and I can't use one from High Sierra cuz my 2008 is not support on that either.

So here is my OSInstall thought:

decompress the OSInstall mpkg. edit the Distribution file with only 1 edit. recompress the package.

Next comparable the hex values in both files. there will the signing difference and should be able to fine the 1 byte difference or whatever a single character translates and compresses down to.

then I should know where the 1 byte to change is in the signed file. Do this a few times for other unsupported Macs and could end up with an unsupported OSInstall file that's official.
[doublepost=1560040169][/doublepost]

My second attempt worked and the driver is mountable.

Both volume are mounted.

I noticed both the Data volume and OS volume are nearly size on a fresh install. Pure coincidence.

1. resize disk to just it's size using Disk Utility. Do this by partitioning the disk and make the second partition HFS+. Let Disk Utility shrink the fresh install volume.

What I did in the terminal:

diskutil list

-> find /dev/disk#

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

sudo dd if=/dev/disk3 of=yourDiskFileName.img.dmg.raw bs=4096

-> file will be in your home folder or whatever directory you where in the Terminal

in Finder, remove .raw

double click the dmg, both volumes should mount. If not, it did not do it right. punt. start over.


Screen shots and mounts are from Mojave. Will see if the disk image mounts like a real volume on Catalina and will see if it restores. You should be able to use Disk Utility to restore pending it works with APFS volumes. It does look like we will not be able to use HFS+ anymore. Also Mojave installer 10.14.5 now requires APFS.

So we could have a compressed disk image that anyone could restore with basic things done like removing Telemetry.

and / or

We could make a GUI for this, or automated command line app. It could be a nice Swift or SwiftUI project.
[doublepost=1560041569][/doublepost]

Last year I sold a supported Mac (2012 Mac mini and its Thunderbolt Display). My 2008 Mac Pro ran circles around it. The 2012 Mac mini was a good box though and part of me wishes I still had it. I do have a 2018 Mac mini in the cloud / swift web server running Perfect. It runs some backend work for one of my iOS Apps. I also a 1 full year of Anka Build for testing. And Parallels Desktop which I might nix it's sub.
[doublepost=1560041816][/doublepost]Looks like we have a big leg up mostly because of Mojave. I don't see how acceleration will work on non-metal GPUs. I may take a plunge and get an a Thunderbolt eGPU case for my 27" iMac 2011.

Cool.

I'm using a slightly different dd for speed /dev/rdiskX instead of /dev/diskX. It's in fact significantly faster but less reliable since its unbuffered (would be dangerous for larger volumes and disks that sleep)

I also used bs=1m instead of 4096 - don't know if that matters but it's just a larger buffer.

Finally I'm piping to gzip and gunzip to save space.

Does your volume boot in Cat? I'm not there yet.

 

[Starplayr]

Cool.

I'm using a slightly different dd for speed /dev/rdiskX instead of /dev/diskX. It's in fact significantly faster but less reliable since its unbuffered (would be dangerous for larger volumes and disks that sleep)

I also used bs=1m instead of 4096 - don't know if that matters but it's just a larger buffer.

Finally I'm piping to gzip and gunzip to save space.

Does your volume boot in Cat? I'm not there yet.

I am getting ready to do a restore now. I used 4096 because that is what SSDs are supposed to use instead of the default 512. Some people use a massive bs # to fill the disk, but that approach did not work for me. resizing the volume down to its smallest size in Disk Utility helped me and the 30 GB copy was very fast. I used a USB3 disk to an SSD on a MPB 2016.

I think I am going to use Target Disk mode from my 2016 and do the restore. then do another restore from my unsupported Mac. Since for me getting an install is Kinda of a pain not having a good OSInstall.mpkg yet. Cloning a fresh system is the best option for me currently.

In the long run it will be faster too.

 

[i.am.not.a.hipster]

Excellent. A good option for some who don't have a supported Mac available. But you'll still have to perform your Cat updates on the linux server and transfer back to pro. Thanks for sharing.

You don't have to physically move the NVME or drive from the MacPro5,1 to perform an macOS update.

You can easily do this:

(I) boot to a different drive (or a linux live CD if you do not have a second drive) on the MacPro5,1

(II) on the MacPro5,1's command line, do: dd if=/dev/myharddisk | ssh name@mygentoolinuxserver 'dd of=file.raw'

(III) launch a QEMU macOS instance using that file.raw as hard drive in linux, with a Metal graphics card passthrough to the instance. Then, perform the macOS update within the instance.

(IV) then in the linux host's command line, do "dd if=file.raw | ssh name@mymacpro51 'dd of=/dev/myharddisk && reboot'.

This can all be done on a remote linux server. No need to move any physical thing actually.

 

[Starplayr]

I restarted my restore a few times. Taking longer to restore than to make the first image.

I discovered you can use Control-T to see how many bytes have been copied while its running. Which is nice. It would be great if the darn tool had a progress bar, but I am sure it's so people can use pipes and do other things with it as shown above.

 

[jbiser361]

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

hmm okie doke thanks bud
[doublepost=1560049219][/doublepost]

I did a fresh install and it's about 30GB. I did a successful Archive to a file but on my Supported Mojave machine it wasn't mountable. But it could still be, anyways did not want to risk it, so I decided to partition the drive and shrink the fresh install volume to the exact size of the data, that way I don't have to run the count= and just let it copy the entire partition and can even leave sparse off. I was out shopping today, so I'm back now to see if dd is good enough. It seems going to a file and restoring it is the best option you can even pipe to a file and go to a disk but keep in mind the disk will have the exact same info as the original so I believe dd to a file is the best option, plus you can keep it on other backup volumes and restore. I don't know what formats dd actually supports. I hosed my Catalina install with dd from disk to disk. So I'm not dd'ing from my 2008 Mac yet, just my supported Mac.

I have not been able to create a good OSInstall.mpkg/distribution file yet. Same signing problems and I can't use one from High Sierra cuz my 2008 is not support on that either.

So here is my OSInstall thought:

decompress the OSInstall mpkg. edit the Distribution file with only 1 edit. recompress the package.

Next comparable the hex values in both files. there will the signing difference and should be able to fine the 1 byte difference or whatever a single character translates and compresses down to.

then I should know where the 1 byte to change is in the signed file. Do this a few times for other unsupported Macs and could end up with an unsupported OSInstall file that's official.
[doublepost=1560040169][/doublepost]

My second attempt worked and the driver is mountable.

Both volume are mounted.

I noticed both the Data volume and OS volume are nearly size on a fresh install. Pure coincidence.

1. resize disk to just it's size using Disk Utility. Do this by partitioning the disk and make the second partition HFS+. Let Disk Utility shrink the fresh install volume.

What I did in the terminal:

diskutil list

-> find /dev/disk#

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

sudo dd if=/dev/disk3 of=yourDiskFileName.img.dmg.raw bs=4096

-> file will be in your home folder or whatever directory you where in the Terminal

in Finder, remove .raw

double click the dmg, both volumes should mount. If not, it did not do it right. punt. start over.


Screen shots and mounts are from Mojave. Will see if the disk image mounts like a real volume on Catalina and will see if it restores. You should be able to use Disk Utility to restore pending it works with APFS volumes. It does look like we will not be able to use HFS+ anymore. Also Mojave installer 10.14.5 now requires APFS.

So we could have a compressed disk image that anyone could restore with basic things done like removing Telemetry.

and / or

We could make a GUI for this, or automated command line app. It could be a nice Swift or SwiftUI project.
[doublepost=1560041569][/doublepost]

Last year I sold a supported Mac (2012 Mac mini and its Thunderbolt Display). My 2008 Mac Pro ran circles around it. The 2012 Mac mini was a good box though and part of me wishes I still had it. I do have a 2018 Mac mini in the cloud / swift web server running Perfect. It runs some backend work for one of my iOS Apps. I also a 1 full year of Anka Build for testing. And Parallels Desktop which I might nix it's sub.
[doublepost=1560041816][/doublepost]Looks like we have a big leg up mostly because of Mojave. I don't see how acceleration will work on non-metal GPUs. I may take a plunge and get an a Thunderbolt eGPU case for my 27" iMac 2011. I have an extra EVGA 680 and a Kepler Titan.

My Galaxy GTX 680 is the coolest Kepler card I've scored this yet. It was new in box. Has a cool glowing LED on it. says Kepler on it as well. quiet, dual fan and it runs almost as fast as my Titan only its flashed and my Titan is not. Flashed cards btw only run about 1% faster vs. the same non flashed card despite having twice the channels on MP 3,1. I mainly like have a flashed card again for switching startup drives on the fly.

 

[pkouame]

I restarted my restore a few times. Taking longer to restore than to make the first image.

I discovered you can use Control-T to see how many bytes have been copied while its running. Which is nice. It would be great if the darn tool had a progress bar, but I am sure it's so people can use pipes and do other things with it as shown above.

I have a bootable Catalina partition next to my original Mojave .5. Yaaay.

The block copy was perfect. De-compressing the image as a pipe to dd took a little more time than I expected. But my 64GB stick zipped down by 50%.

Yes. CTRL-T is useful. I also make sure my machine doesn't sleep (or at least put the disks to sleep.

Didn't have to adjust anything after the dd. Feels good to boot from SSD again.

 

[Starplayr]

Actually, all of my Macs are pro Macs that are from 2010 or earlier, so they are all unsupported in Catalina.

So the question is -- how does one easily install macOS Catalina on a drive, without having a supported Mac?

I skip pass this supported Mac versus unsupported Mac issue by emulating macOS Mojave using QEMU on my other Gentoo linux server, with an AMD graphics card passed through to it to get Metal. In the QEMU instance, I then installed macOS Catalina. On the linux host, the drive is actually a .qcow2 file, which I then convert to raw, and then I just dd the raw file image to an NVME card in linux. I then transfer the NVME card to the MacPro5,1 and boot, and it all just worked.

Do you have any experience running QEMU on Mac with Apple’s hypervisor and is a pass through possible to get metal with QEMU on Mac with its metal capable GPU? Just curious as I hear slot about QEMU on Linux with KVM.
[doublepost=1560049890][/doublepost]

I have bootable Catalina partition next to my original Mojave .5. Yaaay.

The block copy was perfect. De-compressing the image as a pipe to dd took a little more time than I expected. But my 64GB stick zipped down by 50%.

Yes. CTRL-T is useful. I also make sure my machine doesn't sleep (or at least put the disks to sleep.

Didn't have to adjust anything after the dd. Feels good to both from SSD again.

That’s great. My Target Disk Mode was running way too slow. so I killed it and am booted up off USB2 on my fresh install and plan to run my DD again to another volume. Then do my setup and back it up.

Wasn’t planning to start from scratch again and figuring this out did take some time but it’s great to have an exact copy of an install and I have plenty of drive space to store snapshots.

 

[pkouame]

You don't have to physically move the NVME or drive from the MacPro5,1 to perform an macOS update.

You can easily do this:

(I) boot to a different drive (or a linux live CD if you do not have a second drive) on the MacPro5,1

(II) on the MacPro5,1's command line, do: dd if=/dev/myharddisk | ssh name@mygentoolinuxserver 'dd of=file.raw'

(III) launch a QEMU macOS instance using that file.raw as hard drive in linux, with a Metal graphics card passthrough to the instance. Then, perform the macOS update within the instance.

(IV) then in the linux host's command line, do "dd if=file.raw | ssh name@mymacpro51 'dd of=/dev/myharddisk && reboot'.

This can all be done on a remote linux server. No need to move any physical thing actually.

Nice going on the remote shell dd command.

I would only do this wired myself. But since I'm all wifi, I suspect it would add a lot of time to my workflow. I opted for an unbuffered dd and clocked it (CTRL-T) @ around 20MB/sec locally, so maybe I don't have to worry about a comms bottleneck.

Then again the elegance of the solution may be worth just taking a long coffee break for when it is needed .
I'm not sure what the update cycle for Catalina is going to be this summer so having to do this every few weeks may not be total mind bender...Good job - I may try this approach on my (as yet dormant) pro 3,1.

 

[jbiser361]

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.

can we modify the frameworks and add code from hs and mojave for the unsupported machines, or would AppKit be a bugger

 

[Starplayr]

Keeping El Capitan is starting to become useless as it can’t read APFS volumes and you can’t split disks with APFS and HFS which is useful to shorten a disk down for archiving and restoring.

In El Cap a partitioned disk is one big disk. Hybrid disks: with APFS and HFS are treated in Unix as two separate disks which os handy.

 

[pkouame]

@Starplayr - by the way your idea of distributable "bare-bones" boot images has the makings of another decent solution while dude's patcher is still in development (maybe?).

I was very careful to touch my image as lightly as possible. To date it only consists of telemetry - IOHID - AppleHDA - IO80211. (sound and wifi respectively) and no framework patches.

EDIT: running off internal APFS SSD is much more tolerable (even if still un-accelerated)
[doublepost=1560051047][/doublepost]

I actually just installed the february update of 10.14.3 (the one that fixes the group facetime bug) and noticed the slowdowns and memory usage (https://neomallers.com/uploads/mbp62mem1.jpg) . HTOP seems to show kernel_task is using 41% of memory. The January release of 10.14.3 runs fine though (2% memory or something really small)

10.14.5 has that weird glitch where if safari is open and the mouse cursor is inside it, the mouse cursor speed stutters and hangs.

I didn't know about the Safari bug - yes .3 is looking sweeter and sweeter...

 

[Starplayr]

My Galaxy GTX 680 is one PC Card that doesn’t look like it’s upside down when inside a Mac. It’s attractive too. Will send another pic with it’s LED’s on.
[doublepost=1560051963][/doublepost]

@Starplayr - by the way your idea of distributable "bare-bones" boot images has the makings of another decent solution while dude's patcher is still in development (maybe?).

I was very careful to touch my image as lightly as possible. To date it only consists of telemetry - IOHID - AppleHDA - IO80211. (sound and wifi respectively) and no framework patches.

EDIT: running off internal APFS SSD is much more tolerable (even if still un-accelerated)
[doublepost=1560051047][/doublepost]
I didn't know about the Safari bug - yes .3 is looking sweeter and sweeter...

My first image is full. Even telemetry. But my next one will have Telemetry removed. i don’t have native WiFi or Sound working yet but will try a few kexts to get closer to a working image.

I got creative and used a 2006 Mac Mini for WiFi. And USB or Bluetooth for Sound.

My WiFI is Broadcom and worked in Mojave which is on ice right now on a read HD to make room for Catalina experiments.

But yeah, we could do some compressed base images. I’d be happy to serve any images on my web server. I have a gigabyte connection to it and my web host gives me unlimited bandwidth. It’s a 2018 Mac Mini. It’s SSD is off the charts. I’ve got plenty of space on it as it’s mostly used to do some REST stuff. Not much traffic is on it right now.
[doublepost=1560052245][/doublepost]I’m mainly getting into Catalina for SwiftUI work which I haven’t started yet. I’ve got 5 projects in UIKit, SpriteKit and ARKit. Breaking away is a tad of a pain And I don’t want my want to cut off users who will be be stopped at iOS 12. I think iPad Mini 2’s are gonna get cutoff again and I just had mine replaced and my iPad Pro busted. So I am probably gonna port some projects to SwiftUI later. I am getting heavily into MVC and OOP so migration to SwiftUI should be simple.

 

[pkouame]

My Galaxy GTX 680 is one PC Card that doesn’t look like it’s upside down when inside a Mac. It’s attractive too. Will send another pic with it’s LED’s on.
[doublepost=1560051963][/doublepost]

My first image is full. Even telemetry. But my next one will have Telemetry removed. i don’t have native WiFi or Sound working yet but will try a few kexts to get closer to a working image.

I got creative and used a 2006 Mac Mini for WiFi. And USB or Bluetooth for Sound.

My WiFI is Broadcom and worked in Mojave which is on ice right now on a read HD to make room for Catalina experiments.

But yeah, we could do some compressed base images. I’d be happy to serve any images on my web server. I have a gigabyte connection to it and my web host gives me unlimited bandwidth. It’s a 2018 Mac Mini. It’s SSD is off the charts. I’ve got plenty of space on it as it’s mostly used to do some REST stuff. Not much traffic is on it right now.
[doublepost=1560052245][/doublepost]I’m mainly getting into Catalina for SwiftUI work which I haven’t started yet. I’ve got 5 projects in UIKit, SpriteKit and ARKit. Breaking away is a tad of a pain And I don’t want my want to cut off users who will be be stopped at iOS 12. I think iPad Mini 2’s are gonna get cutoff again and I just had mine replaced and my iPad Pro busted. So I am probably gonna port some projects to SwiftUI later. I am getting heavily into MVC and OOP so migration to SwiftUI should be simple.

I'm a big time Swift fan all the way back to the Chris Lattner days - of LLVM fame (just one of many Apple software Giants that jumped ship a while ago) Keep in mind that SwiftUI is still very buggy - and the tools are in even worst shape this early in the beta process. But have fun.

 

[TimothyR734]

Felix Schwarz:

Wow! macOS #Catalina adds new frameworks to allow drivers to run IN USER SPACE & manage them via “SystemExtensions”!

More on macOS Catalina #DriverKit drivers:

- packaged alongside the app like modern app extensions.
- removed from the system when the host app is
- (possibly) can be dynamically loaded & unloaded them as needed using OSSystemExtensionRequests

In #SOTU, Apple just announced that "in a future #macOS release", KEXTs targeting driver categories covered by #DriverKit will no longer work and encouraged developers to adopt #DriverKit now.

wow

 

[bige12]

It’s too bad I wanted to see if catalinia would work on a unsupport mid 2011 MacBook Air I got Catalina installed on a external hard drive, and I connected to my iMac I can boot into catalinia, if I try my MacBook Air it dose not boot

 

[i.am.not.a.hipster]

I restarted my restore a few times. Taking longer to restore than to make the first image.

I discovered you can use Control-T to see how many bytes have been copied while its running. Which is nice. It would be great if the darn tool had a progress bar, but I am sure it's so people can use pipes and do other things with it as shown above.

I just pump the stream to a virtual pipe to see its movement, using my favorite UNIX command, pv:

dd if=myfile | pv | dd of=myfile.too

 

[jackluke]

Actually, all of my Macs are pro Macs that are from 2010 or earlier, so they are all unsupported in Catalina.

So the question is -- how does one easily install macOS Catalina on a drive, without having a supported Mac?

I skip pass this supported Mac versus unsupported Mac issue by emulating macOS Mojave using QEMU on my other Gentoo linux server, with an AMD graphics card passed through to it to get Metal. In the QEMU instance, I then installed macOS Catalina. On the linux host, the drive is actually a .qcow2 file, which I then convert to raw, and then I just dd the raw file image to an NVME card in linux. I then transfer the NVME card to the MacPro5,1 and boot, and it all just worked.

Yes, once I succeeded to install Mojave from Virtualbox directly on an external USB SSD, using command line VBoxManage to create and set RAW disk access permissions, the advantage is to save space since these uncompressed raw or clone images occupy a lot. Then just unplugged the external USB SSD from VM, and plugged from a cold start to the Mac and it worked without no effort, even keeping installed all the virtualbox extensions.

This RAW disk access is possible from many virtualization software, not sure about QEMU, but I guess so.

 

[i.am.not.a.hipster]

Do you have any experience running QEMU on Mac with Apple’s hypervisor and is a pass through possible to get metal with QEMU on Mac with its metal capable GPU? Just curious as I hear slot about QEMU on Linux with KVM.

QEMU is very polished in linux.

I am familiar UNIX stuff, and my gentoo server can do passthroughs in QEMU -- so I don't see any reason why it can't be done on the MacPro5,1 itself running linux directly.

If I get some free time, I might take the .config file for my gentoo linux server, and compile gentoo linux and QEMU on the MacPro5,1 to run them, and then launch into a macOS Catalina emulation instance, but with AMD graphics card passed-throughed to it.