macOS 11 Big Sur on Unsupported Macs Thread

[Xavier]

Just installed 11.5.1 using OpenCore Patcher on my late 2013 iMac. OTE updates are showing and I will be installing 11.5.2 later tonight.

Thanks for making such an easy to use tool! This will totally keep my iMac up and running for a few more years at least!

 

[hwojtek]

Yes, that's my post . And I agree, purge looks interesting. I'm now writing memory stats to a log file every minute. Hopefully that can gives some clues on the next crash.

How about using one of the "free up RAM" utilities? What they actually do is filling up the RAM until it is all gone and then killing the process, a lot of swap movement is involved, perhaps that will trigger this condition?

 

[KvR]

How about using one of the "free up RAM" utilities? What they actually do is filling up the RAM until it is all gone and then killing the process, a lot of swap movement is involved, perhaps that will trigger this condition?

Interesting suggestion! I tried Parallels Toolbox and CleanMyMac X and both ran without issue. Uptime is now almost 48 hours. It's such a weird problem. To be continued..

 

[KingCornWallis]

Can someone give me feedback on this proposed setup for Big Sur onwards?

MacBook Pro 17", Late 2011:
Subtle Design Native Apple AC/BT 4.2 Airport Card
AMD GPU disabled by internal MUX chip
Metal Supported GPU via eGPU (TB1 or Expresscard34) outputting video to external display

It's my understanding that this configuration would allow for native support of newer OS's, and the only hiccup is that the 17" MBP screen would not have graphics acceleration; Only the External monitor being fed video from the eGPU would be accelerated.

If this is true, only a patched installer would be necessary with no further messing in the weeds.

I could additionally use Catalina on the go (graphics acceleration), and switch to Big Sur (or later) when I dock at home. (Dual Boot)

Thoughts?

 

[K two]

Update OTA from 11.5.1 w/OCLP v.0.2.5 TUI default settings for Mini3,1. Smoothest Big Sur update, yet. Slight increase in system overhead, CPU temps no change. Boots reliably.🤞🏼

 

[0134168]

Can someone give me feedback on this proposed setup for Big Sur onwards?

MacBook Pro 17", Late 2011:
Subtle Design Native Apple AC/BT 4.2 Airport Card
AMD GPU disabled by internal MUX chip
Metal Supported GPU via eGPU (TB1 or Expresscard34) outputting video to external display

It's my understanding that this configuration would allow for native support of newer OS's, and the only hiccup is that the 17" MBP screen would not have graphics acceleration; Only the External monitor being fed video from the eGPU would be accelerated.

If this is true, only a patched installer would be necessary with no further messing in the weeds.

I could additionally use Catalina on the go (graphics acceleration), and switch to Big Sur (or later) when I dock at home. (Dual Boot)

Thoughts?

Please, keep us updated. I´m in the same case.

 

[makra]

Has anybody tried 11.5.2 on 2012 non-retina 15" MBP stock WiFi/BT (BCM4331) board? I'm not sure I want to upgrade mine, since it works fine and it's already a dying dog... I have macOS 11.0.1 and haven't updated any further in fear of losing WiFi/BT, I'm already using the IO80211Catalina.kext. By the looks of it we are still getting macOS 12 on Intel based. Maybe I should fork the $150~ $200 for the upgrade... Any thoughts?

No problems here. Started with installing 11.2 something a few months ago - now on 11.5.2. No issues whatsoever.

 

[HexagonWin]

Just re-did the test on my MB4,1 with the latest OCLP. No USB/keyboard/trackpad now.
So yes, we´ll have to mod at least the USB map file again. I suspect that more will be necessary, i.e. using some of the older kexts with the kext droplet tool, as you cannot just put them into the extensions folder any more due to volume sealing.

So I'd been trying to play around with the 4,1 again, I tried putting some of the fb kexts and stuffs, and tried putting a ethernet cable to it after opening vnc server (by putting hdd to other hackintosh and then put it back to macbook)
However, i couldn't connect to the vnc server.
I don't think I know how to put those required kexts into the installation without using the input devices, if you still have the working efi can you please test if ethernet works there or not? And if you can please attach it too.
Thanks..

 

[cybermol]

Upgrade installed Big Sur 11.2.3 on an early 2008 15" Macbook Pro 4.1 using OCLP. Went surprisingly well. Very functional with the graphics acceleration patch. I'm happy with it.

I'm having one issue. There is no sleep function. It can't be set and then activated using sys preferences battery, terminal, closing the lid or apple menu. System sleep preventers: .Display Boot and IOdisplaywrangler. Went through the list of possible problems and solutions that prevent sleep without success. Not sure if this is purely related to the beta acceleration patch or OCLP in general. I have not read any answers on OCLP Github that solve this problem.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to restore the sleep function? I appreciate all the work, time and effort that so many have put into this project. Thank you,

did you solve the problem?

 

[Larsvonhier]

did you solve the problem?

MacBook Pro 4,1 (17" glossy high rez) running 11.5.x with OCLP 0.2.4 running fine with sleep function. No other mods needed for it. Perhaps it´s an issue with 11.2.3 ?

 

[ascii27]

Both Apple Maps and Find My issues with the initial buttons (not being there / clickable with the OpenGL framework patches) can be circumvented by force-quitting the app, keep the (missing) button position in mind, open app again and rapid-fire-click onto that area until the "whats new" popup window closes.
You have to only do this once and both apps are fully usable from then on.
Of course, satellite views are still too dark - but we had that since Mojave/Catalina.
View attachment 1771145

Thanks so much! This solved my problem. I wish there was a central database with all these problems/solutions so we could find the answers more quickly. The biggest problem is trying to figure out how to phrase the question...

 

[vkd]

I installed with OCLP (OpenCore) bootloader and everything working fine. Problem is it seems to be more than a small resource hog. Takes even longer than ever to boot and all movement in the system is less than snappy. I don't feel so inclined to use it, I'll stick with booting High Sierra for now I reckon. Unless anyone has any good ideas about how to make it less so?

 

[K two]

View attachment 1822761

I installed with OCLP (OpenCore) bootloader and everything working fine. Problem is it seems to be more than a small resource hog. Takes even longer than ever to boot and all movement in the system is less than snappy. I don't feel so inclined to use it, I'll stick with booting High Sierra for now I reckon. Unless anyone has any good ideas about how to make it less so?

"Snap" returns by selecting Reduce Motion in the Accessibility/Display CP. Big Sur is a bit of a slug on a Fusion Drive or HDD. 😞

 

[Macschrauber]

seems that Safari 14.1.2 (with 11.5.2) has no more Kepler rendering issues with the Macrumors site.

Installed that on MP4.1, took the drive over to my 5,1 and both machines with Kepler GPUs behave well with Safari and this site.

Was unusable before, needed to use Firefox for Macrumors, now seems to be sorted.

 

[passatgt]

Anyone else experience stability issues with 11.5.2? My config is in my signature. I just updated a couple of hours ago and i had to force restart 2 times now. First, the screen just turned white when i opened Safari. The second time every app just simply closed and i was unable to open any app, it would crash immediately, even Finder for example.

 

[KvR]

Anyone else experience stability issues with 11.5.2? My config is in my signature. I just updated a couple of hours ago and i had to force restart 2 times now. First, the screen just turned white when i opened Safari. The second time every app just simply closed and i was unable to open any app, it would crash immediately, even Finder for example.

Yes. See my previous posts:

macOS 11 Big Sur on Unsupported Macs Thread

Yes! I have the same problem. I also opened thread about it on StackExchange. There you can find a full write up of my experiences so far. One very interesting thing I've found is that when I purge from the command line (or logged in via SSH) everything comes back to life.

forums.macrumors.com

I've seen several reports of the apps crashing. Currently I have an uptime of 8 days. But I don't now if that's luck, due to a change in configuration or something specific in the boot process. I cannot reliably force a crash. This makes it very hard to debug.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Anyone else experience stability issues with 11.5.2? My config is in my signature. I just updated a couple of hours ago and i had to force restart 2 times now. First, the screen just turned white when i opened Safari. The second time every app just simply closed and i was unable to open any app, it would crash immediately, even Finder for example.

This happens only on my experimental platforms (all iMac12,x and iMac11,x) when having a crash and not really properly booting into OpenCore, again. Sometimes one comes through to the desktop and then the problems come up. In all cases a PRAM reset and a reboot into OpenCore fixes all issues.

Currently I am using OCLP 0.2.4 and Big Sur 11.5.2 on my iMac12,2 / WX 4170 (pretty similar to yours) without any problems and crashes.

Uptime: 20:19 up 12 days, 20:03, 5 users, load averages: 1.03 1.18 1.09

P.S.: The weird Screen Recording issue persists, though. The RX480 on my iMac11,3 works perfect in this case.

 

[KvR]

This happens only on my experimental platforms (all iMac12,x and iMac11,x) when having a crash and not really properly booting into OpenCore, again. Sometimes one comes through to the desktop and then the problems come up. In all cases a PRAM reset and a reboot into OpenCore fixes all issues.

What do you mean by not not really properly booting into OpenCore?

 

[resurrector66]

Hello, I'm running Catalina on a 2008 MacBook unibody silver, using Dosdude1's Patcher. runs with no problems.
I downloaded OCLP and made installer usb with Big Sur 11.4. My question is can I run an upgrade install, keeping all my stuff, or is clean install required?

 

[passatgt]

This happens only on my experimental platforms (all iMac12,x and iMac11,x) when having a crash and not really properly booting into OpenCore, again. Sometimes one comes through to the desktop and then the problems come up. In all cases a PRAM reset and a reboot into OpenCore fixes all issues.

Currently I am using OCLP 0.2.4 and Big Sur 11.5.2 on my iMac12,2 / WX 4170 (pretty similar to yours) without any problems and crashes.

Uptime: 20:19 up 12 days, 20:03, 5 users, load averages: 1.03 1.18 1.09

P.S.: The weird Screen Recording issue persists, though. The RX480 on my iMac11,3 works perfect in this case.

About the screen recording issue... i created a test app to record my screen using AVFoundation, and seems to be working fine if i set the codec to proRes422. Does not record with h264 and the error is just "noDataCaptured"..., so not really that useful. But at least we know it can work, i'll keep working on it and see if i can come up with a solution.

 

[jgleigh]

I'm having seemingly more crashes with 11.5.2. There's an on-going issue with GPU crashes taking down the whole system (usually when starting WoW) and it's gotten worse since 11.5.2. I also had a few weird instances recently where switching my monitor and keyboard through a KVM-type switch caused the machine to reboot.

 

[passatgt]

About the screen recording issue... i created a test app to record my screen using AVFoundation, and seems to be working fine if i set the codec to proRes422. Does not record with h264 and the error is just "noDataCaptured"..., so not really that useful. But at least we know it can work, i'll keep working on it and see if i can come up with a solution.

So, after some testing, i found this app: https://github.com/wulkano/Kap - works perfectly fine. I'm not sure whats the issue is with the built-in screencapture app, because Kap seems to export h264 immediately, so it records in that too. Anyway, this app works

 

[Dilli]

Hello, I'm running Catalina on a 2008 MacBook unibody silver, using Dosdude1's Patcher. runs with no problems.
I downloaded OCLP and made installer usb with Big Sur 11.4. My question is can I run an upgrade install, keeping all my stuff, or is clean install required?

A clean install is better. Since your current version is already pre patched, better to use OCPL tool on clean installation.

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Big Sur 11.5.2 seems to break DRM playback with AppleTV, again. Although the the VDADecoderChecker reports Hardware acceleration is fully supported AppleTV gives me just a black screen using my AMD dGPU while streaming a free series pilot, sound is still fine.

On the other had this works pretty well on my iMac11,3 system still using 11.5.1 (similar hardware setup with Polaris AMD dGPU) and worked before the update on this particular iMac12,2.

EDIT and FIX:

1. UpdatingWhateverGreen to 1.5.2 and Lilu to 1.5.5 (both latest versions) on my stock OCLP 0.2.4 gives me back AppleTV streaming of pilots. You may also just use the latest nightly build of OCLP. I assume it contains the latest OpenCore release and kernel extensions, too.

2. As @KennyW reported my iMac11,3 has a working DRM even with the stock OCLP 0.2.4 generated EFI, too. Who knows...

 

[KennyW]

Big Sur 11.5.2 seems to break DRM playback with AppleTV, again. Although the the VDADecoderChecker reports Hardware acceleration is fully supported AppleTV gives me just a black screen using my AMD dGPU while streaming a free series pilot, sound is still fine.

On the other had this works pretty well on my iMac11,3 system still using 11.5.1 (similar hardware setup with Polaris AMD dGPU) and worked before the update on this particular iMac12,2.

EDIT and FIX:

UpdatingWhateverGreen to 1.5.2 and Lilu to 1.5.5 (both latest versions) on my stock OCLP 0.2.4 gives me back AppleTV streaming of pilots. You may also just use the latest nightly build of OCLP. I assume it contains the latest OpenCore release and kernel extensions, too.

So far, Apple TV+ works flawlessly in my iMac 2010 RX480 with OCLP 0.2.4 or 0.2.5 for Big Sur 11.5, 11.5.1, and 11.5.2.