Yearly Hackintosh upgrade: macOS Monterey with OpenCore

November 16, 2021

Exactly a year ago, I migrated my Hackintosh from Catalina to Big Sur, and from Clover to OpenCore. Apple recently released Monterey, so it’s the first time for me doing a major upgrade since I’m using OpenCore.

So far, OpenCore has been a breeze to work with. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a really high quality piece of software and ecosystem in general, or if it’s because it forced me to learn a lot of low-level details in order to have a working Hackintosh, but both probably have a lot to do with this.

I’ve been upgrading seamlessly all year long through Big Sur updates as smoothly as if I was using a “real Mac”. Upgrading to Monterey might have been as easy (with the addition of upgrading OpenCore and all kexts to their latest version, which I should probably do on minor updates even though I’ve been getting away perfectly fine by ignoring that all year long), but I like to take a new major version as an opportunity to reinstall my system from scratch and start from a clean slate.

My paranoid upgrade procedure

I don’t do cowboy-style upgrades or installations anymore, because I’ve bricked my system too many times and while I’ve always managed to fix it more or less gracefully, it’s always been a somewhat stressful, uncomfortable and time-consuming experience.

I’m also constantly scared of losing critical data by mistake, so I tend to back up everything more often than not. Here’s the procedure I follow to upgrade my system making sure I always have a bootable machine and without risking data loss.

I make space for an empty partition on one of my drives to test the new system.
I make sure that my current system has a full up-to-date backup on an external drive that I keep unplugged until I’m back in a fully stable state.
Because I make the above backup with Time Machine and I don’t trust myself (nor macOS) to 100% reliably set up Time Machine on the new system without fucking up the previous backups, I also do a second (manual) backup on another drive. That step is probably unnecessary.
I install the new system to the test partition, tweaking the OpenCore configuration, drivers and kexts as necessary.
Once the test system is installed and running, I check that everything I need works as expected (display, audio, network, sleep) or otherwise find how to fix it, documenting everything along the way especially for fixes that live outside the EFI directory.
When all is well, I reboot and perform the install on my main partition.
After the install, I restore whatever I need from my previous backup. I still keep the rest of the backup (or at least parts of it) for 6 months or so just in case. That came handy a couple of times in the past. I also wipe the temporary test installation.
Finally, I write a blog post. 😄

This is a bit more time-consuming than straight up performing the installation, and some of those steps might be a bit overkill, but I like going the extra length to make sure everything is backed up and redundant to prevent any unexpected issue and minimize the impact of a program or human error.

Upgrade log

I’ll list all the steps I took in that upgrade, which are very similar to my Big Sur post, but I’ll note here the differences. Here’s the relevant details of my machine:

Motherboard: MSI H110M PRO-D (RTL8111H Ethernet chipset, Realtek ALC887 audio chipset)
CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 Skylake
GPU: GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580

Still following the OpenCore guide, I:

downloaded the latest OpenCorePkg (0.7.5 in my case),
downloaded ProperTree to edit .plist files,
downloaded Monterey from the App Store,
formatted a USB drive as Mac OS Extended (HFS+) with a GUID partition map,
ran sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Monterey.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume (where MyVolume was… my volume) to create the installation media,
mounted the EFI partition of the USB key by running sudo diskutil mount /dev/diskXsY where X was the drive number and Y the partition number (found using diskutil list),
copied OpenCore DEBUG version to it and removed unneeded files as instructed by the guide,
added HfsPlus.efi from the OcBinaryData repo,
added VirtualSMC, Lilu, WhateverGreen, AppleALC and RealtekRTL8111 kexts.

Now here’s what got easier than my first OpenCore installation.

SSDTs

I just had to copy SSDT-PLUG.aml, SSDT-EC.aml and SSDT-USBX.aml from the ACPI directory of my previous installation, the first two which I had built back then with SSDTTime, and the latter being the prebuilt one that didn’t need to be updated.

USB map

I could just copy USBMap.kext from my previous installation to have my USB ports supported right away without having to generate it again or to deal with XhciPortLimit and USBInjectAll. Sweet.

Making the `config.plist`

I started again from OpenCore’s Sample.plist and applied the same tweaks from the Skylake guide. I’m not sure if I could have reused my previous config.plist or not, but I wanted to start fresh and up-to-date.

Everything was the same as my previous installation so I won’t include it here.

The only difference was that I left XhciPortLimit to False as the guide mentions to disable it if running macOS 11.3 or newer, plus I already have my USB map so it shouldn’t be needed either way.

I also had an issue last time where I needed to set SecureBootModel to Disabled instead of the Default mentioned in the guide, but just to check, I left it to Default this time and didn’t have any issue, meaning I can now benefit from Apple Secure Boot!

Removing previous fixes

For Big Sur, I needed to add IO80211HighSierra.kext to get my Wi-Fi to work but I’m now connected over Ethernet so I didn’t need to include it. It’s a good thing because it doesn’t work on Monterey (at least for now, I tried and had the same issue).

Also I’ve had an issue last time that required a CtlnaAHCIPort.kext in order to see my SATA drives in the installer, but that wasn’t required anymore so I left it alone (it actually prevented the installer to boot if it was there).

Finalizing

Once everything was working, I copied OpenCore to my SSD’s EFI directory, and applied the cosmetic tweaks including putting the files from the OpenCore RELEASE version, removing the debug and verbose settings, and adding OpenCanopy.efi for a nice UI.

I still needed to patch the EDID of my screen to force it in RBG mode, and the patch-edid.rb method still works!

After that, I didn’t need to do any tweak at the system configuration level, everything works out of the box including CPU power management and sleep. Power Nap also works like a charm but I turned it off just because it’s not useful to me.

Since my system drive was named the same as my previous installation, Time Machine was able to continue the existing backup and I kept my full Time Machine history! Had I renamed the drive, it seems that I could have used tmutil inheritbackup and tmutil associatedisk to help with that.

Wrapping up

If it wasn’t for a totally unrelated hardware issue that happened around the same time I performed the upgrade, migrating to Monterey with OpenCore was a straightforward and painless procedure and I didn’t encounter any hiccup.

If you too are upgrading your Hackintosh to Monterey, I hope it went as smooth for you as it did for me!

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