Help setting up DW5808e on E7450 Dell

[tpeter60]

I have a Dell E7450, I have attached the sys profile below. I have been trying to get my DW5808e WWAN card to work. It works fine under CENTOS 7, and I have changed the USBCOMP to 6, I have tried 8 and 14 as well. All work under centos, but cannot seem to get it working under Mojave. 

 

I have installed the Legacy_QMI as posted by Herve in another thread. I have read every thread I can find; however, there appears to be some conflicting information related to Legacy_sierrra_qmi.kext and CellPhoneHelper.kext and the need to have one or both or if either of them are required. I have tried almost every configuration I can find and cannot get the device recognized. There is not /dev/tty device, I see the device under USB in System Report. I do not see the device in the WWAN section. 

 

I am sure I am missing something, but for the life of me I cannot seem to find it. 

 

TIA,

 

Tony 

 

debug_19592.zip

[Hervé]

You would need to make up your own "Mojave" legacy QMI kext (in case you wondered, the Sierra part of skvo's kext means Sierra Wireless, not macOS Sierra); any legacy QMI kext made for another OS X/macOS version probably won't do because the inner syntax of the CellPhoneHelper kext it's based on will probably have evolved again. Apple has a strong tendency to change this version after version.

 

Consider the Legacy_Sierra_QMI kext as an injector. All that it does is define a profile for the target WWAN module based on an existing Sierra Wireless module natively supported by OS X/macOS. Obviously, things that you change in your new hardware definition profile are the module's PCI ids. Of course, you still need the CellPhoneHelper kext and make sure you keep this fully vanilla in /S/LE/.

 

An alternative to the Legacy_Sierra_QMI kext is to inject the new profile in FakeSMC. I've detailed this in previous WWAN module threads several years ago.

 

[tpeter60]

Thanks for the response. I am a little closer now. The device is in my System Report.

 

I suspected the Sierra in skvo's kext was wireless not the OS version, but thanks for confirming my suspicions.

 

On a side note, is there a tutorial or documentation I could read around kext's and the structure of one? More for my own edification.

[Bronxteck]

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/#section=Topics&topic=Drivers%2C Kernel%2C %26amp%3B Hardware apple's own documentation would be a good start as its from "the horses mouth" as they say.

[tpeter60]

@Bronxteck Thanks for the info. I now have some new bathroom reading

 

[tpeter60]

@Hervé, @Bronxteck

 

Thank you to both of you, for the direction. I was able to get it working. I need to do some cleanup on the kext and will post here for posterity :).

 

One question, I have to boot to Linux before I boot OSX to get the modem out of Low Power mode. When I power off the laptop, it goes back to Low Power mode.

 

Before I reverse engineer Network Manager and libqmi to put something together for OSX, has someone comeup with a solution?

 

I see a lot of Linux fixes, and the above names appear to address the issue.

 

Thanks,

 

Tony

[Hervé]

I've explained this in another thread (I think) but I believe you could avoid the low-power mode (=Airplane mode) by masking one of the pins on the card.