macOS 12.5: Problems with Hackintoshs and old machines

After updating to macOS 12.5, serious problems can occur with certain configurations – but only if you are using a Hackintosh or have patched an old Mac to be compatible with Monterey. This is reported by the developers of the tool Open Legacy Patcher and the Apple technology blog Mr. Macintosh.

Screwed on the GPU support

The problem is said to have surfaced during the beta test of macOS 12.5. Starting with pre-release 3, massive crashes or system freezes occurred. Affected are users who use the so-called Kepler patch set from Open Core Legacy Patcher – on various MacBook Pro models (9.1, 10.1 and 11.3) as well as iMacs (13.x and 14.x with dGPUs) . After the update to macOS 12.5, you can still enter the password, but then the central WindowServer fails – it tries to render content, but then stops with a “spinning beachball”. After around ten seconds, the watchdog process causes a “real” crash, which takes the user back to the login window. After entering the password, the loop starts again.

Open Core Legacy Patcher is a useful tool that can be used to install current macOS versions, i.e. Big Sur or Monterey, on Macs that Apple no longer officially supports. Accordingly, one cannot expect any help from the manufacturer. The makers of the project are currently looking for a solution to the problem.

Unresolved bugs and unstable beta

One bug that’s still not fixed in macOS 12.5 is a massive Finder memory leak that has persisted for many Monterey releases. It is said to have been known to Apple since at least November and ensures that the search in the file manager eats up enormous amounts of RAM. Especially with very large hit lists, the RAM utilization of the finder increases massively in a short time. You should therefore avoid entering search terms slowly or with just a few letters. The memory leak is still active on current Apple Silicon machines.

In the beta phase, macOS 12.5 was quite unstable at times. This led to Apple publishing several release candidate versions. Shortly before release, there were difficulties with links in Safari, as well as opening errors and aborts with simple drag & drop actions. However, these bugs have been fixed.

(bsc)

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