OS x86 8f1111a Experiences

As soon as the first copy of Mac OS X was leaked to the public I decided to give it a try. I was lucky because my own hardware specs are very similar to the Dev machines that apple leased out with the exception of SSE3. Shortly after release the hacker Maxxuss hacked the release to let SSE2 only machines run rosetta. That version of OS X for intel, 10.4.1, ran very smoothly and was quiet stable with very few exceptions. I could run office programs and photoshop without difficulty. What really bothered me was lack of NVidia drivers, lack of dual monitor support and not be able to sleep my computer.

I ran 10.4.1 almost exclusively, only rebooting to windows for dvd shrink. More recently a new release was leaked 8f1111 (there was a fw before it that I ignored), which was rumored to have better ATI drivers (doesn't help me), dual support and other great features. I had to replace my hard drive anyways, so I decided to try the latest leak and see if I could get more stuff working. These are my experiences documented here to hopefully help other 0sx86 users out.

Installation

Installation was extremely easy for 10.4.3 8f1111 when compared to 10.4.1. The old version was leaked as a vmware image, so you could run it in vmware or you could dd the disk image in vmware to a harddrive and run it natively. Copying the image was easy but you were really limited by the size of the image, only 6gb! All the progams that could enlarge HFS+ partitions would run on osx86 so I had to take another route. I had read somewhere that there was a way to install it on a larger partition by installing Darwin and copying (with ditto) the system files over.

1. Get the vmware image and dd that to a temporary 6gb drive
2. Download Darwin 8.01 and install it on the destination drive
3. Use ditto to copy all the system files over from the temporary drive to the destination drive

Not very many steps required but it was a pain and I spent about 4 to 5 days (including trying other methods of getting more disk space) installing os x before I finally had it installed on the large drive. This was definitely a big hassle and I would not want to go through the procedure again!

To contrast this, the 10.4.3 8f1111 install was incredibly easy thanks to the efforts and Maxxuss and JaS. As Maxxuss has made patches for the TPM, Rosetta and the kernel; JaS has combined them and distrubuted them using ppf patches. Instead of having to download all the different patches and apply them I had only to download one ppf file and apply it to an iso image.

1. Download the 8f1111 dmg file
2. Convert it to and ISO with ultraiso
3. Apply ppf patch, burn to a dvd and install

Whereas the previous install took days, this one took only a couple hours to find the right patch and make sure the dvd worked, then a couple more hours to install. Very simple and easy, almost exactly like installing OS X on a real Mac. I should note that the patch I used also incorporated a newly released update 8f1111a.

I did have one small problem with the installer dvd, on the first few trials it always died with a kernel panic before it made it to the install portion. I booted the dvd with the kernel flags 'debug=0x100' to get a register dump and noted the value in the EIP register, I did this because when debugging kernels Maxxuss always asks for that value. After some quick research I found out that the problem is related to HyperThreading, so I disabled HT in the bios and it was smooth sailing from there -- well almost smooth ;-)

Kernel Issues

The install proceded without any problems so I rebooted and loaded my newly installed operating system. The system was not stable crashing often: iTunes didn't work, office crashed the system on install, random crashes when starting a program, etc. These weren't just normal program crashes but kernel panics. I knew that the 8f1111 release made heavy use of sse3 instructions and, as such, caused sse2 systems to be either incredibly slow or unstable.

Maxxuss had two approaches to patching the kernel for 8f1111: firstly, and sse3 emulator that was exactly equivalent but slow. Secondly, a runtime patcher that was not 100% equivalent but fast. I was running the first method and since that was unstable I didn't bother to try the second option.

Both of the patching solutions had problems and another patching solution was in the works. Eager for a stable system I grabbed one of the early releases that was proported to be the most stable, SSE3 emulator version 2 release 'e'. I installed the kernel had haven't looked back since, my system is extremely stable and hasn't crashed once since I installed the new kernel. I will definitely keep my eyes open for the final release of this kernel that supports HT.

Update!

Maxxuss has released version 3-pre1 of the sse2 emulation kernel. It works really well with and without HT. There is the odd kernel panic that occurs on my system, it is only about once an hour but that is enough to annoy me so I am back to no HT until a better release.

Through trial and error I discovered that the panic only occurred when I had power saving options turned on. Once I set sleep to never the panics disappeared.

Keyboard Weirdness

With my install of 10.4.1 there were odd keyboard issues involving end/home, in general they just didn't work as I would want or expect them to. This was definitely one of the most annoying things so I am very happy that it is fixed in 10.4.3 8f1111a.

Rumored Yet Missing Features

The main reason that I upgraded was because of rumored features. In this respect I was sorely disapponted because there no difference in either sleep mode or dual head display. I could be that they do exist but just don't work with my hardware profile, such is the way with betas and prereleases. I can not shed any light on the ATI driver situation because I have an NVidia card.

I have read rumors or a new release before christmas, version 10.4.4 8g, that claims ATI and NVIDIA support and dual head. Perhaps I shouldn't get too comfortable with 8f1111.

Update

I didn't notice this at first but there are some programs missing from my 8f1111a install, these include dvd player, iPhoto and the X11 system. I copied iPhoto from my old 10.4.1 install and it seems to work. Also, on my 10.4.1 install the preview app wouldn't display any images but in 10.4.3 8f1111a it seems to work perfectly.

Conclusion

It is a great operating system with many benefits over both linux GUI's and Windows (unless you are a hardcore gamer), so I urge you to try it. Many thanks to both Maxxuss and JaS who made this both possible and easy.