Been tinkering with my MacBook Pro 5,4 ( Mid 2009 ) since installing Big Sur after getting wifi to work using the
jackluke prelinkedkernel fix.
I have since made a discovery after using the alternative method of disabling SIP without the Big Sur recovery partition available to me. That is the way that
ASentientBot found out and was agreed with by
dosdude1 in post
#726 . After reloading Big Sur after applying that fix on my Catalina partition I entered ' csrutil status ' in terminal and found that SIP was indeed disabled.
I had downloaded and was trying the
chris1111 Kext Droplet dmg with not much success (prior to disabling SIP) using the method of
jackluke #933 for adding to the kernelcollections or whatever to PreBoot.
The interesting thing that I found when trying to get sound to work was that after I had SIP disabled on Big Sur and was using the Kext Droplet again was that after rebooting after ' installing ' the AppleHDHA.kext from High Sierra that sound was working and was able to increase , decrease and mute without having to do anything further to the kernel collection on PreBoot. To double check the ' sound fix' was still working I rebooted a few times and it was indeed still working each time.
I guess it could feasibly work with other kexts to further improve functionality on Big Sur though I wouldn't know what those kexts would be.
Noted another benefit of having SIP disabled on Big Sur.....able to boot into it without Cmd+S ( Single User Mode ) or needing to boot it into through OpenCoreAPFSloader3.