Category Archive: mac

Backuping the following folders can eat up hundreds of gigabytes on the backup storage, and can cause significant performance reduction if the backup drive is a HDD (some of them can contains millions of files).

• /Applications/Xcode
• /Applications/Xcode-beta
• ~/.gradle
• ~/.npm
• ~/.composer
• ~/.cocoapods
• ~/.android/avd
• ~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/Toolbox/apps
• ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Application Cache
• ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
• ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport
• {path to a node project}/node_modules

By removing these folders from the backups and excluding them in the System Preferences, the backup process can be faster and will consume less storage space.

Nor the Windows, nor the Mac OS firmware updater contains device product IDs for every variant. Such as the “DTLPG3_Mac_Updater.zip” and the “DTLPG3 Updater with El Capitan Fix.zip”.
For me the device productID is same as the DTVP (DataTraveler Vault) drive’s productID.

The trick is to make the firmware updater (Mac OS variant) to work:

• Find your DTLocker+G3’s productID in the System Information app, under USB.
• Change the ‘productID’ in the following file, to your drive’s one:
  DTLPG3_Mac_Updater.app/Contents/Resources/devicePersonalities.plist
  Ex: My drive’s product is 0x160D, so I changed the ID from 0x169D to 0x160D.
• Run the firmware updater app

After this modification, the updater can find and reflash the drive.

The latest updater can be downloaded from the Kingston’s website here: https://www.kingston.com/us/support/technical/products/dtlpg3
With this update the drive can be used with the latest MacOS Catalina.

Here it is my newest Clover build. Since last time I made a research again in the spd.c file and in the DDR4 SPD specification, and I realised that we can identify the speed from the Minimum Cycle Time and what is a most important thing: we must paging to access to upper 256byte of the SPD data.

The Mac OS Mavericks runs great on this laptop, but to get the wlan work, the original wifi card must be replaced.
The UEFI firmware prevent to start with other card than the original, which thing already made a lot of headaches to hp users.
I patched the firmware, and with an also patched flasher, I been able to overwrite the ROM with the modified version.

You can download the modificated files from here => sp54846.zip

1. Open your disk image
2. Unmount all partitons, but do not eject the drive/image.
3. Open the Terminal app
4. cd /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/
5. Get your disk number with diskutil list
6. ./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/diskx fullDevice ~/Desktop/hdd-link lsilogic
7. ./vmware-vdiskmanager -r ~/Desktop/hdd-link.vmdk -t 0 ~/Desktop/hdd.vmdk

I patched the Clover EFI bootloader, to get recognize the DDR4 RAM module size correctly, from the SPD datas.

diff --git a/rEFIt_UEFI/Platform/spd.c b/rEFIt_UEFI/Platform/spd.c
index 04c66d8..a7d389d 100644
--- a/rEFIt_UEFI/Platform/spd.c
+++ b/rEFIt_UEFI/Platform/spd.c

@@ -585,9 +585,24 @@ VOID read_smb(EFI_PCI_IO_PROTOCOL *PciIo)

case SPD_MEMORY_TYPE_SDRAM_DDR4:

+ DBG("SPD[%d]: spdbuf[4]: @0x%x n", i, spdbuf[4]);
+ DBG("SPD[%d]: spdbuf[5]: @0x%x n", i, spdbuf[5]);
+ DBG("SPD[%d]: spdbuf[12]: @0x%x n", i, spdbuf[12]);
gRAM.SPD[i].Type = MemoryTypeDdr4;
- gRAM.SPD[i].ModuleSize = spdbuf[4] & 0x0f;
- gRAM.SPD[i].ModuleSize = (1 << gRAM.SPD[i].ModuleSize) * 256;
+ // size = ((u64)rows * cols * banks * ranks) * bit;
+ // (spdbuf[4] & 0x30) >> 4 : bank address bits
+ // (spdbuf[4] & 0xC0) >> 6 : bank group bits
+ // banks = (4 << addressbits) * (1 << bank group bits)
+ // ((spdbuf[12] & 0x38) >> 3) :ranks
+ // (((spdbuf[5] & 0x38) >> 3)+12) :rows
+ // ((spdbuf[5] & 0x7)+9) : cols
+ gRAM.SPD[i].ModuleSize = (
+ (((UINT64)1 << (12 + ((spdbuf[ 5] & 0x38) >> 3))) *
+ (1 << (9 + ( spdbuf[ 5] & 0x07))) *
+ (1 + ((spdbuf[12] & 0x38) >> 3)) *
+ (4 << ((spdbuf[ 4] & 0x30) >> 4)) *
+ (1 << ((spdbuf[ 4] & 0xC0) >> 6))) >> (20 - 3)
+ );

break;

I added the skylake processor family definitions to the CPUSensors.kext, so it doesn’t cause kernel panic on boot.
It seems to the sensors work fine too.

My changes available on my GitHub profile: https://github.com/majonez/HWSensors