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    macOS Sequoia is out

    Released Sep. 16th, 2024.
    Version 15.0, build 24A335 (same as RC published Sep. 10th).
     

     

     

     
    Sonoma drops official support for Amber Lake MacBook Air8,1/8,2 thereby raising the minimum MacBook Air platform to final 2020 Ice Lake-based MBA9,1. The rest of the supported platforms remain identical to Sonoma. Support for Kaby Lake graphics remain provided with all KBL kexts still present so good news to all owners of Skylake laptops who will all be able to run Sequoia with full acceleration through the SKL graphics patch required since Ventura. For other iGPUs, patches are available through OCLP tool to regain graphics acceleration.
     
    Officially supported Intel platforms are now limited to :
    iMac19,x (8th gen. Coffee Lake)
    iMacPro1,1 (Skylake Xeon)
    MacBookPro15,x (8th gen. Coffee Lake)
    Macmini8,1 (8th gen Coffee Lake)
    MacPro7,1 (Cacade Lake)
     
    With Sequoia, Apple introduced artificial intelligence features that are only available to Apple Silicon models. Intel platforms are not compatible with these.
     
    NB: macOS Monterey is now officially unsupported.
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    Support for Broadcom wireless cards in Sonoma & later (Clover and Opencore)

    As stated when 1st beta was released and confirmed when it was officially released, Sonoma dropped support for Broadcom cards that were supported up to Ventura. A solution based on OpenCore bootloader and the OCLP Patcher has been available since mid-summer of 2023.
     
    Nothing new on the matter as I post this article in January 2024, except that, good news for Clover users (yes, we still exist!), the solution now works with Clover too and is no longer limited to OpenCore.
     
    The issue for Clover users was that there was no readily available solution to block vanilla IOSkywalkFamily kext from being loaded at startup, even when trying to do this through patching the Info.plist file of the kext in the Clover config. No matter what, as long as the vanilla kext loaded/was cached, injecting the replacing kext would result in immediate Kernel Panic.
     
    This was finally resolved in Clover r5157 which integrates a kext patch in the form of a flag that can be enabled in the Clover config: BlockSkywalk (NB: it does not work with version r5155 or r5156).
     
    With this patch enabled, the abandoned IO80211FamilyLegacy from previous macOS version can be loaded/injected and so can the older/replacement version of the IOSkywalkFamily kext that is required. This being put in place, the OCLP patcher can then be used to apply the wireless root patch (whether Modern wireless or Legacy wireless) to finalise the Sonoma wireless fix.
     
    Broadcom cards that we all previously used up to Ventura, whether DW1560 (BCM5352 chipset), DW1820A (BCM4350 chipset) or Apple's own BCM94360xxx (BCM4360 and related chipsets) can now be used in macOS Sonoma exactly as they could in Ventura and earlier macOS versions.
     

     
    See our dedicated thread on the matter for full details.
    Pinned

    New driver for Realtek PCIe card readers!

    There's renewed interest on the development of drivers for Realtek PCIe card readers and it's fantastics news!
     
    Last year, we reported here on Cholonam's work that, building on the original work of developper Sinetek, gave a new life to some of our Realtek card readers. It was pretty good stuff and allowed many of us with, say RTS525a card readers, to finally be able to use SD cards under macOS. Performance was however pretty limited.
     
    This year, Austere.J (aka Firewolf) has embarked on writing a brand new driver and, my God, is it good! The driver is under active development as we write but Austere.J has started on the RTS525a with super results and he's adding support for other Realtek RTS models too.
     
    2 x major improvements compared to Cholonam's driver:
    the card reader is now reported as built-in in SysInfo the card's full performance is being achieved  

     
     

     
    You can follow the on-going R&D here at Insanelymac and drivers are posted here on FireWolf's GitHub repo.
     
    Please join me in helping Austere.J in the testing and give him the support and thanks he deserves.
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