It's that time of year again and with it, and a new macOS beta has been dropped. Here's all the info you need to get started.

• Mac Pro 5 1 Opencore Install Guide
• Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 11
• Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 15
• Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 10

Reminder that Dortania and any tools mentioned in this guide are neither responsible for any corruption, data loss, or other ill effects that may arise from this guide, including ones caused by typos. You, the end user, must understand this is beta software on unsupported machines so do not pester developers for fixes. Dortania will not be accepting issues regarding this mini-guide except for typos and/or errors.

Mac 11.3 on Mac Pro 5,1 / OpneCore failed during update. I am such a bonehead, totally forgot my Mac Pro 5,1 was running open core and updated to 11.3 today. My update screen progress bar froze i left it alone for about 3 hours. Now when I boot the machine back up it takes me to an Install Screen for Mojave. Thunderbolt Mac Pro Early 2009 with Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge Card About my Mac Pro 5,1 Prerequisites My Upgrade Journey Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge Card package contents Disassemble GC-Titan Ridge Install flashrom using brew Assembling Programmer Connect to the blue chip Verify flashrom can detect your CH341A 24 25 Series EEPROM Flash Bios USB. OpenCore Legacy Patcher. A python program with an Objective-C GUI for building and booting OpenCore on both legacy and modern Macs, see our in-depth Guide for more information. Supported features: System Integrity Protection, FileVault 2,.im4m Secure Boot and Vaulting. WPA Wifi and Personal Hotspot support.

• In love with Big Sur with Opencore on my Mac Pro 5.1! Yesterday was the day where I decided to install macOS Big Sur on my Mac Pro 5.1. I used Martin Lo's OC package and it was so easy to upgrade. I previously had a patched Install of macOS Catalina on my NVME and decided to give OpenCore a try. I only mounted the EFI Partition of my NVME.
• Download OpenCore and unzip it. Open your macOS Terminal and type in sudo, then drag from the OpenCore Folder 'Utilities/BootInstall' the File BootInstall.command and drag it the Terminal and enter. Follow the Questions and choose your Drive for OC, enter and confirm with your Root Password.

This guide expects you to have a basic understanding of hackintoshing. If you are not familiar with it, we highly recommend you to wait until there is an easier and more straight-forward solution available.

# Backstory

More a mini-explainer as to why this release is a bit more painful than average macOS releases, the main culprits are as follows:

# AvoidRuntimeDefrag

With macOS Big Sur, the AvoidRuntimeDefrag Booter quirk in OpenCore broke. Because of this, the macOS kernel will fall flat when trying to boot. Reason for this is due to cpu_count_enabled_logical_processors requiring the MADT (APIC) table, and so OpenCore will now ensure this table is made accessible to the kernel. Users will however need a build of OpenCore 0.6.0 with commit bb12f5f or newer to resolve this issue.

# Kernel Collections vs prelinkedkernel

Since 10.7, the prelinkedkernel has been the default way for real macs to boot. This contained a very minimal amount of kexts to get a mac booted. This same bundle is what OpenCore uses to inject kexts, and was hoped to last quite some time. With macOS Big Sur, a huge change happened in where Apple no longer makes it the default form of booting.

Due to the hard work of @acidanthera, OpenCore gained experimental support for this new format in roughly 2 weeks, and we can now attempt to boot Big Sur on our hackintoshes without a Mac or VM - although you will likely run into some issues along the way.

# Prerequisites

Before we can jump head first into installing Big Sur, we need to go over a few things:

# A supported SMBIOS

Big Sur dropped a few Ivy Bridge and Haswell based SMBIOS from macOS, so see below that yours wasn't dropped:

• iMac14,3 and older
  • Note iMac14,4 is still supported
• MacPro5,1 and older
• MacMini6,x and older
• MacBook7,1 and older
• MacBookAir5,x and older
• MacBookPro10,x and older

If your SMBIOS was supported in Catalina and isn't included above, you're good to go!

For those wanting a simple translation for their Ivy and Haswell Machines:

• iMac13,2, iMac14,2 and iMac14,3 should transition over to using iMac15,1
• iMac14,1 should transition over to iMac14,4

# Supported hardware

Not much hardware has been dropped, though the few that have:

Mac Pro 5 1 Opencore Install Guide

• Official Ivy Bridge U, H and S CPUs.
  • These CPUs will still boot without much issue, but note that no Macs are supported with consumer Ivy Bridge in Big Sur.
  • Ivy Bridge-E CPUs are still supported thanks to being in MacPro6,1
• Ivy Bridge iGPUs.
  • HD 4000 and HD 2500, initial developer beta forgot to remove drivers but more than likely to be removed in later updates.
• BCM94331CD based Wifi cards.
  • See Wireless Buyers guide for potential cards to upgrade to.
• Certain SATA controllers dropped
  • For some reason, Apple removed the AppleIntelPchSeriesAHCI class from AppleAHCIPort.kext. Due to the outright removal of the class, trying to spoof to another ID (generally done by SATA-unsupported.kext) can fail for many and create instability for others.
  • A partial fix is to block Big Sur's AppleAHCIPort.kext and inject Catalina's version with any conflicting symbols being patched. You can find a sample kext here: Catalina's patched AppleAHCIPort.kext
  • This will work in both Catalina and Big Sur so you can remove SATA-unsupported if you want.

Also note that AMD OSX has updated their patches, but they are experimental and unsupported and you will not obtain support for them:

And a special note for MSI Navi users, you no longer require the ATY,rom/-wegnoegpu patch to boot the installer!

# Up-to-date kexts, bootloader and config.plist

Ensure you've updated to the latest builds (not releases) of OpenCore and all your kexts, as to avoid any odd incompatibility issues. You can find the latest builds of kexts and OpenCore here:

• Driver Repo (contains OpenCore builds too).

You will also need to ensure you have a few NVRAM variables set:

• NVRAM -> Add -> 7C436110-AB2A-4BBB-A880-FE41995C9F82:
  • boot-args:
    • -lilubetaall
      • Newest builds of Lilu(v1.4.6+) and most plugins do not require this boot-arg
    • vsmcgen=1
      • Newest builds of Lilu(v1.4.6+) and VirtualSMC(v1.1.5+) don't need this boot-arg
    • -disablegfxfirmware
      • Newer builds of WhateverGreen(v1.4.1+) resolves this

If you're unsure what version of OpenCore you're using, you can run the following in terminal:

• Note: The about command will require you to include bit 0x2 in Misc -> Security -> ExposeSensitiveData, recommended values for ExposeSensitiveData is 0x6 which includes bits 0x2 and 0x4.

# Known issues

With Big Sur, quite a bit broke. Mainly the following:

• Lilu
  • Mainly user-space patching has severely broke, meaning certain patches like DRM don't work
  • Kernel-space should be working correctly with v1.4.6, but plugins may require updates due to a complete rewrite of the patcher for Kernel Collection support.
• VirtualSMC
  • Some users may notice that even with vsmcgen=1 in boot-args, you'll still have VirtualSMC failing. To work around this, you may need to use FakeSMC till vSMC and Lilu issues are resolved.
  • Resolved with v1.1.5+
• Battery status
  • Currently RehabMan's ACPIBatteryManager is the only working kext for battery status.
  • Resolved with VirtualSMC v1.1.5+
• AirportBrcmFixup
  • Forcing a specific driver to load with brcmfx-driver= may help
  • BCM94352Z users for example may need brcmfx-driver=2 in boot-args to resolve this, other chipsets will need other variables.
• Intel HEDT hackintoshes failing to boot
  • This is due to Asus and many other OEMs excluding certain regions from your RTC device, to resolve this we can create a new RTC device with the proper regions.
  • OpenCorePkg includes a sample SSDT that goes in-depth: SSDT-RTC0-RANGE.dsl

And while not an issue, SIP has now gained a new bit so to properly disable SIP you need to set csr-active-config to FF0F0000. See here for more info: Disabling SIP

# Installation

For the installation, you'll need a few things:

• macOS Big Sur installer
• 12GB+ USB drive
• A Mac, hack, or pre-existing VM to download the installer and create install media
• Latest builds of OpenCore and kexts (see above)

# Grabbing the installer

To grab the Big Sur installer, download the beta profile from Apple's developer portal, then check for updates in System Preferences. If you don't have a developer account, you can use gibMacOS to download it:

Download gibMacOS and open gibMacOS.command:

Press M to change the Max OS, then enter 10.16 to switch the (update) catalog to the Big Sur one.

Press C to change the catalog, then select the number for the developer catalog.

Select the number for the Big Sur beta to start downloading it.

Once finished, open the InstallAssistant.pkg that was downloaded - it will be located in the gibMacOS/macOS Downloads/developer/XXX-XXXXX - Install macOS Beta folder. This package from Apple will create Install macOS Big Sur Beta.app in your /Applications folder.

Run the InstallAssistant.pkg and point this to whichever drive you're booting off of, this is where the Install.app will be dropped:

Once done, you should find it located in your Applications folder:

# Creating the installer

To create the USB is quite simple, grab your USB drive and open Disk Utility in macOS. Next format as follows:

• Name: MyVolume
• Format: macOS Journaled
• Scheme: GUID Partition Map

Once this is done, run the following command:

This will take some time so you may want to grab a coffee, once done your USB should be good to boot!(Assuming you updated OpenCore and co earlier)

# Installing

Installing macOS 11: Big Sur on a Hackintosh is fairly similar to how previous version of macOS were installed, with the main issues being:

• KernelCollections over prelinkedkernel (discussed above)
• Installation being much longer
  • This is due to the new snapshot feature of the OS
• Certain kexts breaking
  • Mainly Lilu and plugins, though quite obvious when they break

For the last one, if you get a kernel panic with Lilu we highly recommend you to update to the latest version with links we provided above. If errors are still not resolved, you may need to disable Lilu outright.

# Troubleshooting

# Stuck at Forcing CS_RUNTIME for entitlement

This is actually the part at where macOS will seal the system volume, and where it may seem that macOS has gotten stuck. DO NOT RESTART thinking you're stuck, this will take quite some time to complete.

# Stuck at PCI Configuration Begins for Intel's HEDT boards

As previously mentioned, Intel HEDT motherboards may have some issues revolving around their RTC device in ACPI. To resolve, you'll need to look at your RTC device and see which regions are missing. For more information, see here: SSDT-RTC0-RANGE.dsl

# Stuck on ramrod(^^^^^^^^^^^^^)

If you get stuck around the ramrod section (specifically, it boots, hits this error, and reboots again back into this, causing a loop), this hints that your SMC emulator is broken. To fix this, you have 2 options:

• Ensure you're using the latest builds of VirtualSMC and Lilu, with the vsmcgen=1 boot-arg
• Switch over to Rehabman's FakeSMC (you can use the MinKernel/MaxKernel trick mentioned above to restrict FakeSMC to Big Sur and up

And when switching kexts, ensure you don't have both FakeSMC and VirtualSMC enabled in your config.plist, as this will cause a conflict.

# DeviceProperties injection failing

With Big Sur, macOS has become much pickier with devices being present in ACPI. Especially if you're injecting important properties for WhateverGreen or AppleALC, you may find they're no longer applying. To verify whether your ACPI defines your hardware, check for the acpi-path property in IORegistryExplorer:

If no property is found, you'll need to create an SSDT that provides the full pathing as you likely have a PCI Bridge that is not documented in your ACPI tables. An example of this can be found here: SSDT-BRG0

• Note: This issue may also pop up in older versions of macOS, however Big Sur is most likely to have issues.

# Some kexts may not be compatible with Big Sur yet

There are a lot of kexts out there, and Big Sur is still pretty new. Not all kexts are working yet, so if you're experiencing a weird kernel panic, one thing you can try is booting with only the essential kexts (Lilu, VirtualSMC/FakeSMC, WhateverGreen) and seeing if it works. If so, you can enable kexts one by one to try to narrow down the issue.

# Virtual Machine Route

If you're still facing issues, or if with a new beta things break, you can try the virtual machine route to install on a disk and then transfer it over to your hack. Follow the following instructions to build install media and then install in a hypervisor.

Note: If you have an AMD CPU, this method isn't going to work.

# Building the Installation Media

Requirements:

• A computer or VM running macOS
• The desired macOS installation software installed to /Applications

Once you have the installation software installed to /Applications you will need to create a VDI of the installation media that will be used to install macOS in your VM. The instructions below are intended to be cut and pasted without editing unless specified.

First, set the IMAGE variable to the name of the installation you are installing. The example defines the image for Big Sur.

Next, create an empty 16GB image to host the media.

Verify that you have a 16GB file named 'Install macOS Beta.img' before continuing. After that, attach it to your macOS system as a virtual disk using the variable you created earlier.

Run diskutil list and verify that you have a disk attached that is type 'disk image'.

Now that the image is mounted, format it to Journaled HFS+.

Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 11

Once the image is formatted, create the installation media.

Now detach or eject the virtual disk.

You now have a raw image of the installer. Follow the appropriate page for the hypervisor you'll be choosing:

Reading Time: 8minutes

OpenCore is, for a lack of a better word, amazing. If you don’t know what OpenCore is, read about some of it’s benefits here. I have no experience (yet) with other versions of OpenCore such as the Legacy patcher but fully intend to explore that as well at some point.

This post is the quick and easy guide that should have anyone up and running with OpenCore on the cMac Pros in minutes. This guide may have steps in it that are not needed for most people but I include them so that the guide can work for anyone that reads it. Most of the text in this guide is simply explaining stuff, so don’t let the fact you see a bunch of text scare you off, this really is a simple process. Let’s get to it!

What you need:

– 2009, 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro (2009 4,1 must be flashed to 5,1)
– Westmere or newer CPU architecture
– 144.0.0.0.0 Boot ROM (You get this by running the Mojave installer and just doing the firmware update that is a part of it)

– Martin Lo’s preconfigured OpenCore for cMP package.
For that package, go to this page, scroll down until you see all the attachments. Pick and download the latest one (0.7.1 at this time of writing)

The result will be a .zip file downloaded to your system that has everything you need to install OpenCore on your Classic Mac Pro.

Prep:

– If your Mac has multiple displays connected to it, disconnect all but one of them. Most people won’t have to do this but some graphics cards have issues getting to the recovery OS when multiple displays are connected. So to keep this applicable to everyone, I’ll just recommend you only have one screen connected. (Especially if your GPU is an RX580 8GB)

That is it. You’re now ready to install OpenCore.
Unfortunately this being the world it is, a disclaimer. Your data is your responsibility, make sure you have backups. Do all of this at your own risk. Noone but you is liable if anything goes wrong. Don’t fart in an elevator and inhaling toxic fumes is bad for you. Etc. Etc. Etc.

1. Disable SIP

   Even if you have a GPU that does not offer a boot screen, you can get to the recovery partition! But first, it’s a good idea to check if your system even has a recovery partition. To do that, open the Terminal application (Applications > Utilities). With Terminal open, type in the following:

   diskutil list

   And hit enter/return. Depending on how many drives you have in or connected to your Mac Pro, this list may be pretty big.
   Each disk will be listed, with under it all the partitions of that disk.

   What you’re looking for is the disk that holds your operating system, it will mention the following partitions:
   If you see a partition that says:

   APFS Volume Recovery

   You should be good to go. For me the disk this is on is shown as “disk2”, for you it may have another number. The recovery partition may show a different size as well and that’s ok.

   If you do not find the recovery partition, and it is possible you don’t have one depending on how your macOS was installed, you will either have to create a recovery partition or use an external installer drive. You can create a recovery partition by re-running the macOS installer and let it install over your current system (no user files will be lost but always have a backup. Tools such as Carbon Copy Cloner can also create a recovery partition for you on an external drive.

2. Perform three NVRAM resets before booting into your recovery partition

   Restart your Mac and hold down Command+Option+P+R to reset the NVRAM (Also called PRAM). You’ll hear the Mac chime after a few seconds (this varies depending on the amount of RAM in your Mac). Keep holding those keys to repeat the process and until you’ve heard the chime three times in total (or 4 if you’re not sure, doing more of them can’t hurt). Immediately after the last chime, change the key combination to Command+R to boot into your recovery partition, then move on to the next step.

3. Boot to your recovery partition.

   This is done by restarting your Mac and holding down Command+R as soon as you hear the startup chime. Or you’ve ended up here after doing the NVRAM reset.

   If you have a GPU that is flashed for macOS or natively supported by macOS, you’ll see the startup screen with the progress bar.
   If your GPU is not flashed or natively supported you won’t be able to see anything on the screen. So just hold down Command+R when you hear the chime for 30 seconds and then let go. Booting from recovery can be quite slow so you’ll likely end up staring at a black screen for a few minutes. If you still don’t see anything after 10 minutes (being generous here), shut down your Mac and try again.

   You should end up in Recovery mode and see this:
   

4. From the Utilities menu, open Terminal

5. In Terminal, type the following:

   csrutil disable

   Followed by return/enter key. This will disable SIP. Don’t worry, you can re-enable SIP if you want, after OpenCore has been installed.

6. Restart your Mac and verify SIP is disabled

   This is done by opening the Terminal application again and typing:

   csrutil status

   The result should be “System Integrity Protection status: disabled.”
   If it is not, go back to step 2 and try again as SIP has not been disabled.

7. Unpack the OpenCore files by opening the previously downloaded .zip file.

   You should see the following files:
   Check out the Readme.txt and just read the first paragraph to check out some of the cool benefits of OpenCore. Read the whole thing if you want, one can never have too much information!

8. Open the Clover Configurator app

   If you get an ‘unidentified developer’ warning, just click OK to dismiss it. Now right-click (or control-click) the app and select “Open” from the popup menu. You’ll get the same warning but this time it’ll allow you to open the app.

9. OpenCore has a lot of options. Don’t be intimidated by this app and it’s large amount of options. Just read on 🙂

10. In the left side bar of Clover Configurator, find “Mount EFI” under Tools and select it

11. Ignore the top half of the window and find the EFI partition of your boot drive in the bottom half

    
    The appropriate boot drive will show the same partitions you saw earlier in Terminal. PreBoot, recovery, etc.

12. Mount the EFI partition

    
    You will be required to enter your administrator password to mount the EFI partition. The result will be the EFI partition showing up on your desktop like a regular hard drive. You can open it there, or alternatively click the “Open partition” button in Clover Configurator.
    

13. Open the EFI partition

    (This gets a bit confusing so read carefully)
    There are a few possibilities of what you’ll see now.
    – A blank partition, nothing in it (proceed to step 14)
    – A folder named “APPLE”. (Don’t touch that folder and proceed to step 14)
    – A folder named “EFI”. If this is the case, open that folder and the EFI folder in the OpenCore .zip file and drag over the contents of that EFI folder (BOOT, OC) to the EFI folder on your EFI Partition.
    So, in the first two scenarios, you drag the EFI folder to your partition.
    In the third scenario, you drag the contents of the EFI folder to the EFI folder on your partition. Check out the second screenshot below for clarification.

14. From the OpenCore .zip file, grab the “EFI” folder and drag it into your EFI partition.

    
    or
    

15. Bless your OpenCore installation

    Open the “Bless OpenCore” Automator script that you unpacked from your OpenCore .zip file. You will be asked to enter your administrator password to run this script.

    As soon as this script runs, you’ll notice a little gear icon in your menu bar. Once this gear icon disappears, the script has run. You will not see any kind of other notification/indication the script has completed cussecfully.

    This is the only time you will need to run this bless script. There is no need to use it again even with future updates.

16. Using Clover Configurator, unmount your EFI partition

    You are done with the EFI partition so it can now be unmounted. Navigate to Clover Configurator and click the unMount partition button.
    You can now quit Clover Configurator.

17. Restart your Mac

    If you were unable to see a boot screen before, you should see one now. At first you’ll see your boot drive shown on the screen, just sit back as OpenCore will automatically select your boot drive in a few seconds and continue the startup process. If you’re impatient, just select it yourself with the arrow keys and hit enter/return.

    This screen where you can select your startup drive is called the bootpicker. There are a few things that should be mentioned.
    • Some graphics cards will not show the boot picker on a Mac, due to incompatible firmware. On the vast majority of these cards there is a switch that lets you select a BIOS/firmware, just flipping that switch should allow it to display a boot picker screen.
    • Some graphics cards may show the boot picker in weird colors and/or distorted. This is also because of a compatibility issue. However the boot picker is still functional and it won’t hurt the machine of the card, but it may look funky. See the image below for an example.

You’re now running an OpenCore enhanced Mac Pro, congratulations! If you didn’t read the OpenCore readme text file before, here are some of the benefits it lists:

• Boot screen (via GOP for unflashed card)
• Boot picker (only support EFI operating systems)
• Firmware protection (e.g. to run UEFI Windows. BootROM version will be spoofed to 9144.0.7.1.0. This is normal, and safe for the cMP)
• Ability to watch DRM streaming content (Mojave and later)
• NVMe and SATA drives on a PCIe card show up as internal drives
• TRIM (regardless of trimforce status)
• Support for Apple USB SuperDrive
• Enable Continuity
• Ability to run non-GUI 32bit software in Catalina
• Ability to run any natively supported ancient OSX with modern graphic card (e.g. Radeon VII in 10.6.8)
• Ability to boot Catalina / Big Sur Recovery Partition
• Possible to run 8x32GB RAM in macOS [WARNING: on the first time you enable this memory config, you may need to let the cMP keep rebooting itself for 45min or even longer before all 256GB RAM can work properly in macOS]

Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 15

I suggest you join the following Facebook groups:
– Mac Pro Upgrade
– OpenCore – On the Mac Pro
You’ll hear about the latest release of OpenCore as soon as it’s available and are able to ask questions, get support if needed etc. Updating OpenCore with a future release is as easy as re-doing steps 7-17 in this guide with the exception of step 15, the Bless script. If you want, you can now also turn SIP on again. To do this, boot into your Recovery partition, open Terminal and type “csrutil enable” followed by enter/return. restart your Mac and SIP will be enabled again.

Install Opencore Mac Pro 5 10

I have asked Martin LO, the creator of the cMP OpenCore package, to read this guide before I published it. If you read this guide, it means Martin Lo signed off on it 🙂 Thanks to Martin Lo and Steve from Mac84 for their time proofreading this!