So I finally took the plunge a couple weeks ago and upgraded my hackintosh to OS X 10.11 El Capitan. This is just some preliminary notes on how my upgrade went, and some guidelines you may want to follow if you’re similarly upgrading your machine.
Because this is a major version upgrade, and El Capitan is adding stricter SIP, I recommend being a bit more methodical/paranoid than normal with the upgrade:
- copy existing clover config/installation to a USB key for backup/emergency use
- a full bootable clone of your 10.10 install is best, but a 10.10 USB installer with a known good clover config is good enough in most cases
- find any/all updated kext patches for your hardware (e.g. cloveralc, handoff/BT, 5Ghz wifi)
- copy all kexts that you plan to inject via clover to the 10.11 folder
- alternatively, you can copy your kexts to /Library/Extensions after your installation is finished. I chose this route so I could use a stricter SIP setting than most people are using.
- add necessary ‘BooterConfig’ and ‘CsrActiveConfig’ values to config.plist to configure or disable SIP
- most people are using CsrActiveConfig 0x67 or 0x77; this is basically entirely disabled, and ultimately turns off all of the security that SIP offers.
- if you just want to turn off kext signing (ala kext-dev-mode=1 from yosemite) you want to use 0x11
- you can find a list of the various Csr options over at insanelymac.
- update any kext patches to their 10.11 versions
- If you have an unsupported Nvidia card…
- manually turn off the web drivers from the preference pane prior to running the installer.
- On the final reboot after installing, manually add the nv_disable=1 boot flag just to be safe
- install Nvidia web drivers & reboot without nv_disable
- If you use CloverALC, make sure to run the script again to re-insert the layout/zml files
- rebuild kernel cache one last time and reboot
For Nvidia users using any SMBIOS other than Mac Pro, you don’t need to change your SMBIOS for the install. Use a tool like pacifist to force install the drivers, then manually run the installer package. The Nvidia installer script does a check for existing driver components (specifically NVDAResmanWeb.kext), and if it finds them, it bypasses the hardware/SMBIOS check and allows the installation on any system with compatible OS version.