My Dell Mini Forum

shines on · 05:20 AM

It appears that apple has removed support of Intel Atom CPUs with the 10.6.2 update of Snow Leopard. Also removed is the chipset/graphics drivers for GMA950.

Quote:

D945GCLF2 Snow Leopard - InsanelyMac Forum

You will have an ugly surprise on 10.6.2, atom support is removed, panic all over, I got it working(but like crap) with 10.6 kernel and disabler...still messing with it to get it working at least w/o disabler, but so far the horizon is not blue...
I'll post my results/tricks once i'm done or get bored of this board and sell it...

This may not bode well for us...

mechdrew · 10-23-2009, 06:13 AM

I highly doubt this for technical reasons. First, the Atom CPU wasn't actually supported, it's just compliant with the minimum requirements of the system. I like to think of it as a Core 2 Solo Lite. Second, they can't remove GMA 950 support, they'd kill the MacBooks and Mac minis from 2006 (and in the case of the mini, until 2009!) by doing that. That would make for a lot of unhappy customers. I think they're just messing with a bad developer build.

Akki · 10-23-2009, 02:20 PM

I bet your right, bad build or install, but that said Apple does play that sort of game, you only have to look at the iPhone jail breaking arms race for evidence.

Hope they don't.

But then wouldn't kill me to freeze at 10.6.1.

shines on · 10-23-2009, 02:47 PM

Were the old 2006 macbooks/minis 64bit capable processors? Apple could simply remove the 32bit extensions for the GMA950 chipset, leaving us boned and genuine mac users unaffected. This of course assumes that the 32bit snow leopard kernel can address 64bit extensions.

Though it is far more likely that the developer builds are just dodgy. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

mattchiro · 10-23-2009, 02:57 PM

The first Mac mini's were not 64bit

mcroger · 10-23-2009, 07:56 PM

And as far the Mac Pros, there are also "full 64 bits" (EFI + CPU) and "half 64 bits" (EFI in 32 and CPU 64b capable). I've a Mini 2006 upgraded to 2.0 T7200 C2D, it runs 64bits application with the 32 bit kernel as it has a 32 bits EFI (Apple imposed limitation).

mechdrew · 10-23-2009, 08:04 PM

My original MacBook (which was the ORIGINAL MacBook, first release) was a 1.83 Ghz Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) with GMA 950 graphics. The Core Duo was 32-bit only. Snow Leopard is compatible with all Intel Macs, so they'd be screwing over anyone with the compatible-listed original MacBook.

meklort · 10-26-2009, 11:19 PM

It does turn out that the 10.6.2 kernel reboots before it's finished loading (before the bsd subsystem is initialized I believe). Might be a chameleon thing, might be an atom thing (as I haven't tested it on any other machines). I'm looking into it, but the 10.6.0 / 10.6.1 kernel works fine with 10.6.2.

tehjord · 02:33 AM

they can't remove atom support, it would mean removing support for other intel processors used in even the most recent macs

mechdrew · 10-27-2009, 04:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tehjord

they can't remove atom support, it would mean removing support for other intel processors used in even the most recent macs

I've been thinking about it a little. When people were first "hackintoshing" back in late 2005, it became clear very quickly that not just any processor would do. First, it was limited to Intel (without extra AMD kexts from freelance developers), then the processor needed to support SSE3 and all preceding processor technologies. (Again, this could be overcome with custom kexts to a certain extent.)

Now while the Atom may be very similar to the Core/Core 2 series, it may be lacking one of those small technologies or whatnot which is causing the kernel panic. The actual OS may not need it, but for some reason it conflicts with the kernel.

Sabotage by Apple? Perhaps. Then again it isn't like them to specifically pinpoint non-Apple hardware like this. I guess we won't know until it is finished and released.