metacollin

I am stuck no longer! I *think* I caught everything, I've gone through the interesting parts of it line by line. It certainly seems to be running like a champ, I am working on getting sleep and speedstep running. I am not using NULLCpupowermonitor.kext and generating C/P states, I am not sure if anything interesting is happening yet. Here is the (tentative) final DSDT edit for an E5420 with an HD+ display, no discrete GPU, webcam, or biometric sensor. I am working in winmerge to organize my changes into a universal patch for all e5420 configurations without a discreet GPU. Final.zip

So I have a Dell E5420 and successfully installed Lion. I can tell the DSDT needs some work. I already applied all the changes I could diagnose, but there are still some major issues. It also doesn't help that Dell uses atypical names for lots of stuff. The hardware is pretty typical of a sandy bridge laptop: hm65 chipset, HD3000 graphics, i7 2620m CPU, HD+ display, and no web cam or biometric sensor. My vanilla DSDT is attached, see below for the edit. e5420vanilla.zip

I've been looking through those, and it looks like lots of talented people have been just figuring it out by comparing their DSDT to dumped Mac ones, using system logs, and the ioregistry. I guess I was hoping it wasn't that hard, hehe. Well, thanks for the help! This DSDT stuff is really fascinating to me, so maybe in a few months I'll be of some help. Oh, great work on the DSDT editor + patching system and the kext SystemInfo app. Both have been a tremendous help to me, since I am attempting to hackintosh a laptop that has virtually zero information about doing so online. Thanks!

I'm very new ACPI, DSDT modification and such, but I am diving right in. I've been pouring over the ACPI spec, and realized that I didn't have any clue why certain things needed to be patched. Fixing buggy DSDTs makes sense, but I've been unable to find out what it is exactly that OS X (or more specifically, Lion) hasn't implemented from the intel ACPI spec. Often I understand WHAT the patch is doing, just not why. For example, I often see patches that give the precision timer (usually labeled HPET) more interrupts. I know it's because it's OS X expects the HPET to have 4 interrupts...but where did that information come from? It would be a huge help if I could find some documentation on the kind of things OS X expects from ACPI, and any stuff Apple left out of their implementation and won't work. I would like to just look through the code of a device having issues and be able to think, "Oh, it's missing this name OS X is expecting so the kext isn't being loaded" or "it's using a method OS X doesn't have, I need to figure out an alternative" then fix it. As I write this post though, I have a sinking feeling that this is an internally kept Apple secret and everyone has just been discovering OS X's quirks in regards to ACPI through good old fashioned blood, sweat, and beer.