MP 1,1-5,1 Manually Configured OpenCore on the Mac Pro

[fhturner]

I use OC on USB sticks
unplug > normal boot without OC

How do you set this up? Is there a post w/ instructions? Presumably you just have the EFI partition on the USB stick?

I'm interested in doing this now, as I've had a rough time trying to get this going, and I just erased my Catalina volume and undid all of the EFI/OC mods to get back to vanilla Mojave. Thinking I might try @h9826790's pre-configured setup for enabling HW Accel for H.264/HEVC. May not even worry further about Catalina at this time.

Another possibility is that you have a dual BIOS card with a switch. Make sure that the switch is not in the "performance" position.

Turns out that my card does not actually have a switch, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

 

[startergo]

Question #1: setting the "-no_compat_check" boot-arg in Recovery would stick irrespective of OC running or not? [I believe this answer is Yes]

Yes

Question #2: Do you need to set the boot disk in MacOS before pulling the OC USB, or will it boot to the first available bootable drive?

What is the result of:

sudo bless --verbose --info
sudo bless --getBoot --verbose
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Expected result:
Password:
EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
Current EFI boot device string is: '<array><dict><key>IOMatch</key><dict><key>IOProviderClass</key><string>IOMedia</string><key>IOPropertyMatch</key><dict><key>UUID</key><string>8475B9E7-22E9-4B61-B17B-9CEFEEE18667</string></dict></dict><key>BLLastBSDName</key><string>disk6s4</string></dict></array>'
Boot option is 8BE4DF61-93CA-11D2-AA0D-00E098032B8C:Boot0080
Processing boot option 'Mac OS X'
Boot option matches XML representation
Found device: disk6s4
Disk boot device detected
/dev/disk6s4

If similar- you have a boot device. If not check:

sudo systemsetup -getstartupdisk

If nothing comes back it will boot to the first available boot option.

Question #3: The OC EFI needs to be blessed again when you want to boot back from the USB? [I believe this answer is Yes as well]

If you keep

RequestBootVarRouting=True

you don't need to re-bless, unless you blessed it through the Apple boot picker differently.

 

[fhturner]

How do you set this up? Is there a post w/ instructions? Presumably you just have the EFI partition on the USB stick?

Answering my own question here. I thought there was more to it, but there wasn't. I was trying to use a 2GB USB thumb drive, and Disk Utility was not creating an EFI partition, I assume due to the size of the drive. Tried w/ a 4GB drive and it created the partition, which I was then able to use w/ Martin's config from the HW Accel thread.

I'm interested in doing this now, as I've had a rough time trying to get this going, and I just erased my Catalina volume and undid all of the EFI/OC mods to get back to vanilla Mojave. Thinking I might try @h9826790's pre-configured setup for enabling HW Accel for H.264/HEVC. May not even worry further about Catalina at this time.

My RX 580 is still not showing me the boot screen, but for the first time ever, I'm able to decode and encode both H.264 and HEVC on it. Thanks, Martin!

 

[mangombia]

Yes

What is the result of:

sudo bless --verbose --info
sudo bless --getBoot --verbose
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Expected result:
Password:
EFI found at IODeviceTree:/efi
Current EFI boot device string is: '<array><dict><key>IOMatch</key><dict><key>IOProviderClass</key><string>IOMedia</string><key>IOPropertyMatch</key><dict><key>UUID</key><string>8475B9E7-22E9-4B61-B17B-9CEFEEE18667</string></dict></dict><key>BLLastBSDName</key><string>disk6s4</string></dict></array>'
Boot option is 8BE4DF61-93CA-11D2-AA0D-00E098032B8C:Boot0080
Processing boot option 'Mac OS X'
Boot option matches XML representation
Found device: disk6s4
Disk boot device detected
/dev/disk6s4

If similar- you have a boot device. If not check:

sudo systemsetup -getstartupdisk

If nothing comes back it will boot to the first available boot option.

If you keep

RequestBootVarRouting=True

you don't need to re-bless, unless you blessed it through the Apple boot picker differently.

Well, when I ran those sudo bless commands I got most of the reponse except the last 3 lines, which were:

Boot device path incorrect
Boot option does not match XML representation
XML representation doesn't match true boot preference

So I guess if I pull the USB it will boot to the first available, which should be Mojave.

 

[tommy chen]

I do the same on my Media Server, and have considered migrating that over to my Workstation (though then the USB would mar my clean desktop).

Question #1: setting the "-no_compat_check" boot-arg in Recovery would stick irrespective of OC running or not? [I believe this answer is Yes]

Question #2: Do you need to set the boot disk in MacOS before pulling the OC USB, or will it boot to the first available bootable drive?

Question #3: The OC EFI needs to be blessed again when you want to boot back from the USB? [I believe this answer is Yes as well]

1) the boot-args in NVRAM are only necessary if the boot disk is catalina

2) no, does the start take a little longer
If you do it, you have to reexecute Bless.

3) as long as no start drive is selected (see point 2) a new bless is not necessary
at the next restart with stick OC will be loaded again
[automerge]1587728453[/automerge]
my USB sticks are formated as HFS+ with guid partition
so i install OC on the EFI partition

@Macschrauber tell me, he use a FAT32 MBR stick with OC on its own partition

 

[maclonchas]

Well I took the plunge this morning and followed the instructions on post 1. I can say now (after a lot of fretting) that everything went perfect without a hitch. I thank you all for the clear and concise instructions that let me take this Mac Pro that I have now had for two months and have upgraded to a faster processor, more hard drives, Radeon RX560 and now Catalina.

Thanks

Bill

{cMP 2010 with new processor (3.33 Ghz 6 core, 32 GB of 1333 RAM, Catalina 10.15.4 and Open Core, Radeon RX560}

 

[Sharky II]

Hi all - not checked in in a while, just wanted to ask if there are any issues with security updates? Is it okay to update when the updates pop up, as an open core user?

 

[cdf]

Is it okay to update when the updates pop up, as an open core user?

Sure. I've done several updates through OpenCore. As a precaution, turn off any SMBIOS spoofing first.

 

[MacProM@ne]

Hey everybody, I've had everything running fine on my 5,1, except for 1 thing. Fusion 360. I have a 12-core 3.46, 64gb RAM, NVMe, RX580 w/8gb, and fusion 360 just absolutely crawls. I get constant beachballs for 5-10 minutes at a time for the simplest of things. I followed the guide to make sure HW acceleration was on, and no other applications struggle in the slightest. Is there some incompatibility with OpenCore and Fusion 360? Is there any logs I can generate for you guys to analyze? Anybody else having issues with Fusion 360? I use the software for my business, and I can't seem to get it to where it's usable without constant stuttering and loading. Activity monitor shows minimal load on anything from it. I'm not an expert at this stuff, so any help is appreciated. Thank you all in advance.

Edit: I noticed something while monitoring from Activity Monitor. When F360 is "Not Responding" the CPU percentage stays almost perfectly at 100%, as if it only recognizes one of my processor cores or something. For clarification, the system CPU usage at that same time is only around 2-3%, yet F360 is sitting right at 100%. When I have a truly CPU intensive process running, the CPU Percentage will run into the thousands, so it's definitely not overworking the CPU in any way, it just seems to be limiting itself maybe somehow.

 

[cdf]

Hey everybody, I've had everything running fine on my 5,1, except for 1 thing. Fusion 360. I have a 12-core 3.46, 64gb RAM, NVMe, RX580 w/8gb, and fusion 360 just absolutely crawls. I get constant beachballs for 5-10 minutes at a time for the simplest of things. I followed the guide to make sure HW acceleration was on, and no other applications struggle in the slightest. Is there some incompatibility with OpenCore and Fusion 360? Is there any logs I can generate for you guys to analyze? Anybody else having issues with Fusion 360? I use the software for my business, and I can't seem to get it to where it's usable without constant stuttering and loading. Activity monitor shows minimal load on anything from it. I'm not an expert at this stuff, so any help is appreciated. Thank you all in advance.

Did you disable the VMM flag? You could also try to rule out OpenCore by booting natively (make sure to add the -no_compat_check boot argument if booting into Catalina).

 

[tsialex]

Hey everybody, I've had everything running fine on my 5,1, except for 1 thing. Fusion 360. I have a 12-core 3.46, 64gb RAM, NVMe, RX580 w/8gb, and fusion 360 just absolutely crawls. I get constant beachballs for 5-10 minutes at a time for the simplest of things. I followed the guide to make sure HW acceleration was on, and no other applications struggle in the slightest. Is there some incompatibility with OpenCore and Fusion 360? Is there any logs I can generate for you guys to analyze? Anybody else having issues with Fusion 360? I use the software for my business, and I can't seem to get it to where it's usable without constant stuttering and loading. Activity monitor shows minimal load on anything from it. I'm not an expert at this stuff, so any help is appreciated. Thank you all in advance.

Seems you don't understand what AMD hardware acceleration really is, it's just for video encoding and decoding and enabling it makes an ASIC inside the AMD GPUs specialised in video encoding and decoding to work with MP5,1.

Fusion 360 is a 3d application and don't use the AMD hardware acceleration at all. Check if you have the same slowdowns with vanilla Mojave.

 

[MacProM@ne]

I did disable VMM flag and rebooted a couple of times just to rule out any glitches. Nothing has changed.
I'll try booting into Mojave to see if that changes anything. Thank you both for the suggestions, I'll check back in tomorrow.

 

[h9826790]

Hey everybody, I've had everything running fine on my 5,1, except for 1 thing. Fusion 360. I have a 12-core 3.46, 64gb RAM, NVMe, RX580 w/8gb, and fusion 360 just absolutely crawls. I get constant beachballs for 5-10 minutes at a time for the simplest of things. I followed the guide to make sure HW acceleration was on, and no other applications struggle in the slightest. Is there some incompatibility with OpenCore and Fusion 360? Is there any logs I can generate for you guys to analyze? Anybody else having issues with Fusion 360? I use the software for my business, and I can't seem to get it to where it's usable without constant stuttering and loading. Activity monitor shows minimal load on anything from it. I'm not an expert at this stuff, so any help is appreciated. Thank you all in advance.

Edit: I noticed something while monitoring from Activity Monitor. When F360 is "Not Responding" the CPU percentage stays almost perfectly at 100%, as if it only recognizes one of my processor cores or something. For clarification, the system CPU usage at that same time is only around 2-3%, yet F360 is sitting right at 100%. When I have a truly CPU intensive process running, the CPU Percentage will run into the thousands, so it's definitely not overworking the CPU in any way, it just seems to be limiting itself maybe somehow.

It’s the typical CPU loading when something is CPU SINGLE THREAD limiting.

Unless OpenCore changes the way that F360 use CPU (e.g. rather than let the GPU to handle 3D graphics, but let the CPU to handle it), it is unlikely that OpenCore cause this issue.

 

[paulogilmour]

Hello everyone! I successfully installed Catalina without a patch! This works like a charm! But now my Windows on my other SSD won't boot! If the SSD is in the bay (DVD Bay2), the Mac will boot to Windows without OC, without a bootpicker.

When I remove the Windows SSD, Catalina boots with OC (shows the bootpicker). What is wrong?


I've already reset NVRAM, but it still doesn't work. I've also selected the Mac OS Boot from the BootCamp panel, it doesn't solve ...

 

[h9826790]

Hello everyone! I successfully installed Catalina without a patch! This works like a charm! But now my Windows on my other SSD won't boot! If the SSD is in the bay (DVD Bay2), the Mac will boot to Windows without OC, without a bootpicker.

When I remove the Windows SSD, Catalina boots with OC (shows the bootpicker). What is wrong?


I've already reset NVRAM, but it still doesn't work. I've also selected the Mac OS Boot from the BootCamp panel, it doesn't solve ...

How to: Boot Camp without a Boot Screen

Yes Intro : For install Win10 on cMP you need DVD bootable with Win10 and press "c" on cMP boot to start on DVD, and install Win10. Now I suppose as me you can boot on Win10 from your cMP, if not please remove all your other boot drive (Mac OS, ...) to be sure to boot only first on Win10. 1)...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[lbuisson]

And I suggest to remove Mac OS drive to be sure to boot on Win and finalyse.
I updated my post with complete procedure : https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...n.2114788/page-25?post=28387615#post-28387615

 

[converse320]

This is a stupid thing to get stuck on. But there is no apple Catalina installer dowload available. Is it OK to use the version you get when you use Dosdudes patcher tool? Or can someone point me to where I can download a plain vanilla one.

 

[h9826790]

This is a stupid thing to get stuck on. But there is no apple Catalina installer dowload available. Is it OK to use the version you get when you use Dosdudes patcher tool? Or can someone point me to where I can download a plain vanilla one.

Dosdude patcher should also able to download the vanilla one.

But why you can't get it from Appstore?

 

[converse320]

Dosdude patcher should also able to download the vanilla one.

But why you can't get it from Appstore?

I think Apple have removed it from Appstore if accessed from non compatible computers. Doesn't work from my Mac Pro 5.1. Dosdude downloads OK so I'll use that.

 

[h9826790]

I think Apple have removed it from Appstore if accessed from non compatible computers. Doesn't work from my Mac Pro 5.1. Dosdude downloads OK so I'll use that.

Did you perform the OC installation with VMM flag on, and SMBIOS spoofing off?

 

[converse320]

Did you perform the OC installation with VMM flag on, and SMBIOS spoofing off?

I haven't installed Opencore yet. Are you saying I should install and boot from Opencore, then download the installer from Appstore? I was just following the order of actions in the instructions. I haven't made any changes at all to my system other than downloading stuff I need and installing/formatting a new APFS HD

 

[h9826790]

I haven't installed Opencore yet. Are you saying I should install and boot from Opencore, then download the installer from Appstore? I was just following the order of actions in the instructions. I haven't made any changes at all to my system other than downloading stuff I need and installing/formatting a new APFS HD

If Apple changed the way to download the installer, you also need to change the steps to accommodate to their changes.

Try install OpenCore with VMM flag ON, then go to AppStore again and see if your cMP can download the Catalina installer natively.

 

[sfalatko]

To all - thanks for the work on Opencore and the guide.

Following post #1 I've installed Opencore on my MacPro5,1 and have Catalina running on an NVME drive and Mojave on an SSD (PCI slot). I'm trying to think about options and methods I want to use for general day-to-day use. I have a fairly "simple" system with a flashed GTX680 GPU and an upgraded W3690 processor. As such I only really need Opencore (at least while it is still in very active development) as perhaps the easiest way to upgrade a "stock" Catalina install so I have some questions. One complication is that I have Windows 10 (on separate drive) booting in Legacy mode.

So I think I have two basic paths that I can go down -

1. Commit to Opencore as my boot loader and change my Windows 10 install to EFI and upgrade Opencore monthly or

2. Use "-no_compat_check" in the boot args, boot "normally" and then only use Opencore when I need to update Catalina.

As Opencore is in very active development I think I would like path 2 for now. As I study and learn I see the best path is to put the boot arg in com.apple.boot.plist which leads to some questions that I haven't been able to answer on my own.

1. Do I need to modify com.apple.boot.plist in both the Preboot volume and the "normal" Volume? And some have mentioned the Recovery volume - does it need to go in there as well - so in all three places?
2. Do these changes need to be made to both my Catalina drive and my Mojave drive or just one? If just one how do I know which to modify?
3. What is the best way to modify the files - I can mount the Preboot volume, open it, and edit it but will that change the permissions? How do I restore permissions if they are modified?

Anything else I need to be thinking about? Any more places I can look for information/learning?

Thanks,
SMF

 

[tsialex]

To all - thanks for the work on Opencore and the guide.

Following post #1 I've installed Opencore on my MacPro5,1 and have Catalina running on an NVME drive and Mojave on an SSD (PCI slot). I'm trying to think about options and methods I want to use for general day-to-day use. I have a fairly "simple" system with a flashed GTX680 GPU and an upgraded W3690 processor. As such I only really need Opencore (at least while it is still in very active development) as perhaps the easiest way to upgrade a "stock" Catalina install so I have some questions. One complication is that I have Windows 10 (on separate drive) booting in Legacy mode.

So I think I have two basic paths that I can go down -

1. Commit to Opencore as my boot loader and change my Windows 10 install to EFI and upgrade Opencore monthly or

2. Use "-no_compat_check" in the boot args, boot "normally" and then only use Opencore when I need to update Catalina.

As Opencore is in very active development I think I would like path 2 for now. As I study and learn I see the best path is to put the boot arg in com.apple.boot.plist which leads to some questions that I haven't been able to answer on my own.

1. Do I need to modify com.apple.boot.plist in both the Preboot volume and the "normal" Volume? And some have mentioned the Recovery volume - does it need to go in there as well - so in all three places?
2. Do these changes need to be made to both my Catalina drive and my Mojave drive or just one? If just one how do I know which to modify?
3. What is the best way to modify the files - I can mount the Preboot volume, open it, and edit it but will that change the permissions? How do I restore permissions if they are modified?

Anything else I need to be thinking about? Any more places I can look for information/learning?

Thanks,
SMF

For now, the most sensible option for someone not interested in following the OpenCore development is to use OC installed on an USB key and boot from it when Apple releases a new minor version or a Security Update of Catalina.

Changing Preboot partition files is problematic, since Apple can modify it with updates, USB key with OC is a more fire and forget option.

Obviously you need -no_compat_check.

 

[sfalatko]

For now, the most sensible option for someone not interested in following the OpenCore development is to use OC installed on an USB key and boot from it when Apple releases a new minor version or a Security Update of Catalina.

Changing Preboot partition files is problematic, since Apple can modify it with updates, USB key with OC is a more fire and forget option.

Obviously you need -no_compat_check.

Alex,

Thank you - I had forgotten about creating a boot USB with Opencore. I'll do that. Would putting -no_compat_check in the boot args via recovery mode be sufficient then for normal day to day booting?

Regards,
SMF