A message from vit9696

It’s nice to see us moving forward with another macOS iteration bringing stabilization to a major overhaul we saw last year. macOS 12 is an all-around positive change from what we experienced since it fixed a fair number of bugs and brought rather few deprecations, bringing several new features on the surface and changing little in the background. Another thing to come was Windows, which a number of our users rely on, and its new version with new system requirements.

As most of you noticed, OpenCore 0.7.0 works just fine with both macOS 12 and Windows 11 without any special changes in normal circumstances. With macOS, some minor nuances needed to be addressed. Some quirks broke (e.g. ProvideCurrentCpuInfo or PowerTimeoutKernelPanic) and we fixed them. SMBIOS identifiers were also updated and we synced our database. OpenCanopy flavour recommendations were updated in addition to fixing some issues spotted with certain setups thanks to the attentive eyes of @MikeBeaton. To help identifying and diagnosing the hardware on newer hardware setups @PMheart included CPU MSR and PCI device information in the SysReport OpenCore functionality.

For Windows 11 we provided a document, outlining the requirements and the potential paths to work around them, hopefully avoiding any future misunderstanding. Besides that, we created a new tool, named TpmInfo, which helps everyone understand Intel hardware capabilities in regards to firmware TPM. Time will show whether we can find the resources to emulate certain features requested by Windows 11 in OpenCore, but it is not our priority at the moment, since roughly any post-Skylake system is compatible and only 8-year-old systems will optionally need emulation. As a reminder, please note, that any system needs to have UEFI Secure Boot functionality enabled to properly support Windows 11. OpenCore has fully supported this for quite some time, and all the instructions are already included in the corresponding section of the OpenCore reference manual. We will later release a Dortania guide that is easier to follow.

On the kernel side, there were several really important changes. Lilu got a brand new kext patcher, which unifies the approach for all the operating systems from macOS 10.6 to macOS 12, avoiding many hacks we had earlier and making our QC more reliable. As usual, all the plugins will need to be updated to support macOS 12, and we have already made changes in most of our own plugins, which are also included in this update. Many plugins are now also supported on macOS 10.6 (in 64-bit mode), including AppleALC, VirtualSMC, SMCBatteryManager, and WhateverGreen. All of this comes as a result of enormous work by @Goldfish64. After some research with @dhinakg we were able to find a solution for Bluetooth issues on macOS 12, which landed as a standalone kext named BlueToolFixup. To keep more continuity features available on an as-is basis @khronokernel brought more patches to SidecarFixup, making it widen the support of AirPlay to Mac, Universal Control, and so on.

This is all for today, a complete changelog is provided below. ———Vit

Changelogs

OpenCore 0.7.1

Added SyncTableIds quirk to sync modified table OEM identifiers
Added CPU Info (MSRs) dumping to SysReport
Updated builtin firmware versions for SMBIOS and the rest
Fixed PowerTimeoutKernelPanic on macOS 12
Fixed transparency click detection on OpenCanopy boot entries
Added PCI device info dumping to SysReport
Fixed SetApfsTrimTimeout on macOS 12
Documented requirement for SetDefault.icns width to match Selector.icns width
Added explicit warn and safe fallback to builtin picker on failure to match the above
Added VSCode source level IDE debug config example to debug docs
Added other minor debug docs updates
Fixed incorrect timeout of built-in picker on IA32
Added support for custom kernels on ESP partition
Fixed DEBUG ASSERT on pressing change entry keys with single boot entry in OpenCanopy
Added recommended Apple12 and Windows11 flavours
Added TpmInfo tool to DEBUG TPM status
Fixed incorrect OpenCanopy initial display when default entry beyond right of screen
Fixed ProvideCurrentCpuInfo MSR patch on macOS 12

Lilu 1.5.4

Allow loading on macOS 12 without -lilubetaall (With adapted for macOS 12 plug-ins)
Added guarding for address slot usage to avoid potential kernel routing overflow
Allow using medium size function routing in the kernel
Added medium size function routing for Long mode as they are functionally equivalent
Added matchSharedCachePath API to support dyld cache matching on macOS 12
Added _kmod hooking for kext listening to unify kext patcher logic
Added zlib decompression API
Fixed kernel patcher support on 64-bit 10.6
Added new GPU switching API