Dell Latitude E6520 Mountain Lion

[Igashu]

EDIT: Going to attempt to keep this first post updated with the best/most useful information for E6520 owners with Mountain Lion.



 

Update 2013/01/03:

Posting a new Extra for the E6520. Removed a faulty SSDT that got in there somehow, and reliance on VoodooHDA+HDADisabler have been eliminated with the help of iMick!  Now uses a proper AppleHDA, which should both improve stability and audio quality.  I'll start versioning these archives as well, labeling this one as release 3 ("r3") - will be working with the admins here to have my Extra rolled into the next EDP as well.

TODO:

• Still using NullCPUPowerManagement, would love to get speedstep/sleep working
• Still get an AGPM error, need to edit for proper power mgmt
• Still using VoodooHDA+HDADisabler - need to work on getting the onboard IDT 92HDXX audio working the right way (resolved 2013/01/03)
• Confirm/fix HDMI audio output
• Remove reliance on legacy kexts for wifi/gfx

 

Update 2012/10/15:

Posting a new Extra for the E6520. Changed from the previous pack is an NVS4200M.kext that I created - it's a legacy kext that overrides the appropriate strings in the NVidia kexts in S/L/E, preventing the need to make any edits there whatsoever. Additionally, there is a DeviceMergeNub.kext along with some DSDT changes that enable proper operation of the Atheros AR9280. Previously, I was only able to connect to 802.11b/g networks, and failed to get a DHCP lease on any N network. As it turns out, I was loading a kext with Atheros21 support when I needed Atheros40 support. In addition to proper connectivity, AirDrop is now active and available as well.

This was tested and verified working on a fresh 10.8.2 install with no modifications to S/L/E other than the myHack.kext that a myFix will add.
 

 

Update 2012/08/31:

Extra folder attached largely based on Loralon's work with DSDT, but I've replaced the PS2Controller/Nub kexts from my working Lion install which seem to work better, a FakeSMC that's been injected with the hardware monitoring additions from multifail, an IO80211Family.kext that includes support for the AR9280 Atheros card, and a VoodooHDA/AppleHDADisabler that will hopefully avoid the dreaded VoodooHDA kernel panics.

Let me know how this works for everyone, and hopefully we can use this as a basis for an ongoing, improving EDP for the e6520 w/NVS4200M. Once we get it to a relatively stable state, we can encapsulate most of it into a nice tidy Preboot.dmg, too.


Original Post:

 

Not a lot to go on, but I'll kick this off for the E6520 owners. At this point I have a fresh installation of 10.8 that boots, but not much else. Primarily using only the default myHack Extras, but the DSDT.aml is a vanilla one for my actual system dumped from a Linux LiveCD. (I have the 2.49GHz Core i5 version of the E6500, and an Atheros AR9280 A/G/N half-height wwan adapter that I replaced the Intel with.)

The Quadro NVS 4200M is totally undetected/unutilized at this point:

I'm not very skilled at DSDT patching/hacking but I'm trying to go through and bring items over from my working 10.7 setup, though I know some things have changed. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Extra-Igashu-E6520-r3.tar.gz

[Syonagar]

Dear igashu,

Your need to inject your graphics card either from chameleon, dsdt.aml, enabler kext or modified graphics kext. The easiest would be to start from cham. Try GraphicsEnabler=Yes and also if your have the efi string for your graphics card put in under system properties in chamaleon wizard and enable it.

 

Cheers!

[Igashu]

Dear igashu,

Your need to inject your graphics card either from chameleon, dsdt.aml, enabler kext or modified graphics kext. The easiest would be to start from cham. Try GraphicsEnabler=Yes and also if your have the efi string for your graphics card put in under system properties in chamaleon wizard and enable it.

 

Cheers!

 

Thanks, Syonagar. I'm not sure why I didn't have GraphicsEnabler=yes - that got the card recognized straight away, but interestingly enough I still experience extreme graphical choppiness in ML 10.8 that I did not see in Lion.

[Darvinko]

Thanks, Syonagar. I'm not sure why I didn't have GraphicsEnabler=yes - that got the card recognized straight away, but interestingly enough I still experience extreme graphical choppiness in ML 10.8 that I did not see in Lion.

Were you ever able to get your graphics working properly in ML? If not, I'd like to help.

[Igashu]

Were you ever able to get your graphics working properly in ML? If not, I'd like to help.

 

Negative on that. Seems to be properly injected by Chameleon (the image in the first post is no longer the case; it's recognized as a nVidia Quadro NVS 4200M, with 1024mb of vram, etc, etc - but QE/CI appears to be non-functional. It's super, super choppy to the point of being mostly unusable.

 

I was reading about NVCAP and fired up GPU-Z and then also nvflash, trying to dump the vgabios, but apparently doing so isn't supported on mobile chipsets. (No supported EEPROM error message, bunch of other forum posts I found expressing the same issue.)

 

I also tried messing with AGPM, modifying values in the kext and finally just deleting the kext altogether, but didn't seem to solve the problem either. Running out of ideas!

[Igashu]

Up and running now. Still a lot of polishing and tweaking work to go!

[Igashu]

Posting a new Extra for the E6520. Changed from the previous pack is an NVS4200M.kext that I created - it's a legacy kext that overrides the appropriate strings in the NVidia kexts in S/L/E, preventing the need to make any edits there whatsoever. Additionally, there is a DeviceMergeNub.kext along with some DSDT changes that enable proper operation of the Atheros AR9280. Previously, I was only able to connect to 802.11b/g networks, and failed to get a DHCP lease on any N network. As it turns out, I was loading a kext with Atheros21 support when I needed Atheros40 support. In addition to proper connectivity, AirDrop is now active and available as well.

This was tested and verified working on a fresh 10.8.2 install with no modifications to S/L/E other than the myHack.kext that a myFix will add.

TODO:

• Still using NullCPUPowerManagement, would love to get speedstep/sleep working
• Still get an AGPM error, need to edit for proper power mgmt
• Still using VoodooHDA+HDADisabler - need to work on getting the onboard IDT 92HDXX audio working the right way

[Barret7sc]

This seems to work on a E6520 with a 10.8.0 install as well. I was also successfully able to update to 10.8.2! Keep up the good work!

[drunkenpeleg]

Any shot at getting a list of steps to install myhack/extras folder,etc? Thanks :$

[Igashu]

Any shot at getting a list of steps to install myhack/extras folder,etc? Thanks :$

 

Sure. There is a full guide over at their website (http://myhack.sojugarden.com/guide/) but the basic steps go a little something like this:

 

1. Download myHack from the above site, and run it
   
2. At the menu, choose "Create OS X Installer"
   
3. Select "Create OS X 10.8 Install DIsk"
   
4. Choose your USB flash drive from the menu that appears ("Select target volume to run myhack on")
   
5. myHack will either scan your system automatically, or you can point it to your downloaded 10.8.x image from the App Store.
   
6. myHack will do its thing - this takes awhile - but you'll end up with a bootable install USB.
   
7. Create a folder on the USB drive and copy over the contents of my Extras zip (extracted, not as a zip file!)
   
8. When you boot from the USB drive, it'll lead you through the install process much like the normal OS X installer, but will give you some options near the end to install a default Extra or select your own - select the folder you put my files into and it will install them automatically.
   
9. ???
   
10. Profit!
    

 

If you're unfamiliar with myHack, one of the things it does is places a myHack.kext into your /System/Library/Extensions folder that contains all of the kexts from /Extra/Extensions. The "myFix" operation from the myHack program will regenerate this kext, so if you add or remove things from /Extra/Extensions, be sure to run a myFix again before rebooting to ensure they take effect. The nice thing about this approach is it leaves your SLE clean - all changes are encapsulated in the Extra folder, so it's easy to share and repeat.

 

If you run into problems, make sure to boot with -f -v (no caches, verbose) so you can actually see what's going on - a pretty splash screen doesn't do much good in troubleshooting.