Support for 2008 Mac Pro 3.1

[ferologics]

I couldn't find the 2008 Mac Pro 3.1 listed anywhere in the readme. Is this model supported?

Specs 👉 Model: Mac Pro (Early 2008) Processor: 2 x 2,8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

$ sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu 👉 machdep.cpu.brand_string: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5462 @ 2.80GHz

[barrykn]

Currently it is not supported. First i need to finish v1.0 for Macs that aren't quite as old as yours. Then issue #43 needs to be fixed. This is a sufficiently difficult and invasive patcher improvement that it will probably become a separate patcher -- something like micropatcher for 2009-and-later Mac Pro, 2011-and-later other Macs, and the not-yet-developed minipatcher for older Macs. If your Mac Pro has dosdude1's APFS ROM patch, then that will (hopefully) be sufficient to support it.

Otherwise, another improvement will be needed, in order to support booting Big Sur without an APFS ROM. I intend to eventually, eventually, implement this, because one of my own Macs needs it, but it shouldn't be a surprise if this doesn't happen until sometime in 2021.

[ferologics]

Yes I have the APFS patch indeed. When push comes to shove I could get my hands dirty with the fixes required for earlier mac pros to work. But I think that Dosdude should release a patcher with support for those as well? Idk what’s status of his installer, but I’m not in a “dire need” for using Big Sur as of yet.

[barrykn]

I just remembered, there's another patcher for Big Sur, BigMac from StarPlayrX: https://github.com/StarPlayrX/bigmac

On the 2008 Mac Pro I believe you have to start the Big Sur installation from a Catalina installation, but it's probably worth trying still.

[ferologics]

Oh that looks so tasty 🍔 thank you for the resource 💯