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Up-to-date manual for the Clover Bootloader. A usuable guide for editing your config.plist in Clover Configurator.

CLOVER CRATE

Clover Version Clover Configurator macOS Last Update 00Main

ABOUT

Clover Crate is an unofficial documentation of the popular Clover Boot Manager and its features to help you to figure out what each option does. Its structure closely follows the hierarchy of the config.plist and the corresponding sections in Clover Configurator.

Every setting/parameter (besides obvious ones) is explained. Special attention to detail was given to the ACPI section, as it is one of the most important interfaces for configuring a Hackintosh. In each section/chapter, you can click on the list menu on the top left to select a feature you are interested in to jump to the corresponding entry, so you don't have to scroll all the way through a document. I am talking about this one:

TOC

I created this repo for the following reasons:

  1. Overcoming language barriers: Clover's official documentation (PDF, 171 pages) is only available in Russian.
  2. Condensing available information in one place, presenting it in a more current fashion, using Markdown and GitHub.
  3. Consolidating and Unifying sources which are scattered all over the net: the manual is only available in Russian on GitHub, the differences/changes between releases are only available at insanelymac and it's not a proper changelog. The Clover Wiki at Source Forge has been neglected for years until it eventually got merged into the Wiki of the Clover Bootloader Repo sometime last year.
  4. Exemplifying Clover's features using Clover Configurator.

Disclamer

The information provided in this repository is based on excerpts of the official Russian documentation for Clover using AI-based translation tools (deepl, google and yandex translate) as well as my own extensive research. The translations were reviewed and redacted afterwards, so that they follow the rules of English grammar and spelling while preserving their meaning. Nevertheless, some details may have been lost in translation (although I doubt it).

The methods and techniques presented in this repo are based on utilizing the official Clover release and its features alongside Kexts, SSDTs, Device Properties and other tools to enable/disable devices and features in macOS to get a proper working system which is ACPI conform!

Clover-Crate does not consider patching the DSDT an appropriate measure to get the "Real Vanilla Hackintosh" experience and therefore does not support nor promote patching the DSDT. In fact, it's quite the opposite, as explained here:

MaLd0n's implications that you need a custom DSDT to add and remove (well, remove yes, but disabling is good enough in virtually all cases) devices is incorrect. Aside from those claims, most device rename changes (probably also things you considered „missing“) are also not needed, as they are performed by Lilu and its plug-ins. This approach is a lot safer than previous ACPI renames as dumb find-replace patches can yield false positives, the kext approach cannot.

:warning: CAUTION
This is not a Hackintosh Guide! To configure your own vanilla Hackintosh, you can use these Desktop and Laptop Configs to get you started.
AMD Users: Don't use Clover Configurator for now! It deletes the "Count" and "Skip" keys from the config.plist, which renders the required Kernel Patches for AMD CPUs useless.

TABLE of CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTIONS

If you would like to contribute to the information provided in this repo in order to improve/expand it, feel free to create an issue with a meaningful title, link to the chapter/section and describe what you like to add, change, correct or expand upon.

CREDITS