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by 486sx33 868 days ago
Happy you are posting about hackintosh but generally sharing EFI folders isn’t at all best practice. Anyone who runs a hackintosh should learn how to build a proper config.plist with propertree for their own setup. Spread knowledge not scripts :)
4 comments

Then OP would have 90% of their Github issues queue consist of "can't get XYZ to work" that's because something in the plist is broken and troubleshooting that can get very painful and annoying.
Any references to tutorials for said proper config.plist designs?
I think this guide is best when setting up a Hackintosh: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/prerequisi...

For parts of the config.plist, you can find generators, but when installing on raw hardware you will probably be combining presets based on your system specifics.

I would say that after a decade of hackintoshing, an EFI folder for a specific piece of hardware I happen to have is a good shortcut compared to reading tutorials with wildly varying quality of writing, language, and, crucially, information, most of which just describe where you need to go and get ready-made pieces and put them into predetermined locations. In 90% cases, "this tutorial should have been a script".

The reason is twofold. First, tutorials are not "knowledge". They help you to get started, and then... You're on your own. Secondly, most hackintosh tutorials are not even that. Lots and lots of them are written by people who don't really know what they are doing and why. They put something together, they don't know how it works, but they rush to educate the masses nonetheless.

Mechanistically putting the exact bits of configuration into a file and stringing some files in a directory does not make you magically learn how any of this works.

Then again, I'm no CodeRush or usr-sse2 or vit9696 any other hackintosh star, but I've been tinkering with hackintoshes since 2009 and know a thing or two about how they work. However, I'm emphatically not fond of having to rediscover ACPI quirks of my machine on my own if someone else has done it, and done it better.

Once the thing boots and works at its best, I promptly forget all the bootloader and ACPI intricacies I needed to juggle to make it work, this is not how I do my computering. Which is why premade EFI directories are good IMO, once you know what they are made of and why. Bonus points if well-commented .dsl files are published next to .amls, of course.

Since OSX-KVM is out, though, I very happily confine my hackintoshing to a VM if I need it. With VFIO, you can even have accelerated desktop if it's what you fancy.

I'm confused, why are EFI folders unique in their need to be manually pieced together, as compared to pretty much any other of the thousands of subsystems on a computer?
Every machine differs and the quirks needs to be set on the bootloader for hackintoshes. So the bootloader configuration file and required drivers (kexts) are added directly to a folder in the EFI partition.