macOS High Sierra Hackintosh: The September 2017 Upgrade Guide

On September 25, 2017, Apple pushed macOS 10.13 High Sierra to the public. For Hackintosh users, this wasn't just a wallpaper refresh. The Apple File System (APFS) became the default on SSDs, Metal 2 replaced the old graphics stack, and several legacy frameworks got the axe. Anyone who clicked "Update" in the App Store without updating their Clover configuration or kext cache first was likely staring at a kernel panic or a stuck progress bar within minutes. This article covers exactly what worked and what broke in September 2017, plus the step-by-step upgrade path from Sierra 10.12.x to High Sierra 10.13.0.

APFS: The Silent Game Changer

The APFS conversion was automatic on any SSD during the first boot to High Sierra. That meant your bootloader—Clover, for most people—had to support APFS natively. Clover r4100 and later included APFS driver support, but if your EFI partition was running an older version, the system couldn't find the boot volume after the conversion. The community consensus was to update Clover to r4200 or higher before even launching the High Sierra installer. You also needed the apfs.efi driver from the Clover package sitting in EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI. Anyone who had added a third-party APFS driver from a pre-built image often ran into conflicts; the safest bet was to use only the driver bundled with the Clover release.

Multi-boot setups were a special kind of headache. If Windows or Linux shared the same physical drive, High Sierra's installer would convert the entire drive to the APFS container scheme, which could trash the partition table for non-Apple OSes. The only reliable workaround at the time was to install High Sierra on a dedicated SSD. Some users tried manually creating a JHFS+ volume with diskutil before running the installer and converting after first boot, but that was unsupported and risked data loss. The advice was unanimous: back up every partition before attempting the upgrade.

Kext Compatibility: The September 2017 Snapshot

High Sierra tightened kernel security checks, breaking several popular kexts that hadn't been updated. The Lilu plugin architecture became the standard for patching; any kext that tried raw kernel patching without Lilu usually caused panics. Here are the minimal kext versions required for a stable High Sierra 10.13.0 Hackintosh as of September 2017:

For Ethernet and audio, the specific hardware revision mattered a lot. A detailed guide on patching the Realtek RTL8111 chipset for High Sierra is in the article Fixing Realtek RTL8111 Ethernet on Hackintosh High Sierra: Chip Revisions, Kexts, and ACPI Patches, which covers the differences between the 8111C, 8111D, and 8111G revisions common on Z270 and X99 motherboards. ACPI patching also got more complex because High Sierra handled the DSDT more strictly; the Fixing ACPI Panics on X79/X99 Hackintosh for macOS High Sierra article has the exact patch sets needed to avoid kernel panics on those platforms.

Bootloader and Boot-Args

Beyond Clover updates, the boot arguments shifted. The flag -no_compat_check was still needed for older hardware, but High Sierra started enforcing a minimum CPU generation check for features like HEVC hardware decoding. For Kaby Lake systems, shikigva=1 or shikigva=4 (via WhateverGreen) were necessary to enable hardware acceleration. Users coming from a Sierra installation that had been working with an earlier Clover build (r4000, for example) often forgot to add lilubetaall or -lilubeta when testing beta versions of Lilu, leading to "no kext loaded" panics. The recommended boot-args in September 2017 for a typical Z270/Kaby Lake build were:

• keepsyms=1 (debug symbols for panic analysis)
• debug=0x100 (pause on panic)
• shikigva=4 (enable iGPU and hardware decoding)
• -lilubeta (if using Lilu 1.2.0 beta)

Graphics: Metal 2 and the Web Driver Situation

High Sierra introduced Metal 2, which required a compatible GPU for full acceleration. For NVIDIA users, the web driver version matching High Sierra 10.13.0 (build 17A365) was driver 378.10.10.10.15.114. This driver only supported Maxwell and Pascal cards (GTX 900 and 1000 series). Kepler cards (GTX 600/700 series) worked with the native macOS driver but lost Metal 2 support. AMD users had it easier: the native AMD9500Controller.kext in High Sierra supported Polaris and Vega cards out of the box, though Vega 56/64 needed a specific board-id injection in the device properties. The infamous "black screen on boot" issue with discrete GPUs was mostly fixed by WhateverGreen 1.0.0, but users had to set the ig-platform-id for iGPU to 0x59120000 for Kaby Lake.

Real-World Upgrade Procedure

Based on the collective experience on tonymacx86 and InsanelyMac forums, the safest upgrade path in September 2017 looked like this:

1. Back up the entire boot drive using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper (APFS conversion is irreversible without a full restore).
2. Update Clover to the latest release (r4200 or later) and copy the apfs.efi driver to the EFI partition.
3. Replace all kexts in /EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other with the versions listed in the table above.
4. Disable SIP temporarily (csrutil disable from recovery) to allow the installer to write to the system volume.
5. Download the High Sierra installer from the App Store and run it. Do NOT use the upgrade-from-Sierra option if you have a non-standard partition layout; instead, create a USB installer and boot from it.
6. After the first boot, re-enable SIP (csrutil enable) and verify the APFS conversion succeeded by running diskutil apfs list.

One common mistake was forgetting to update the SMBIOS to a High-Sierra-compatible model (iMac18,3 for Kaby Lake). Using an older SMBIOS from Sierra could cause the App Store to refuse login or iMessage activation to fail. The 2017 iMac Pro SMBIOS (iMacPro1,1) wasn't widely used yet because it triggered the "no audio device" bug on many Z270 boards.

Known Pitfalls in September 2017

Several specific issues plagued early adopters. The Realtek RTL8111 Ethernet kext often crashed when waking from sleep; the patch described in the Ethernet article above was the only reliable fix. X79 and X99 owners faced ACPI panics related to the XSDT table, which required the SSDT-EC.aml and SSDT-USBX.aml hotpatches. The _OSI method had to be modified to return "Darwin" for some OEM firmware. Those ACPI fixes are detailed in the X79/X99 article linked earlier. Users with Broadwell-E CPUs (i7-6800K and above) discovered that High Sierra's power management for the X99 chipset was broken unless AppleIntelInfo.kext was used to inject the correct plugin-type.

For those who relied on pre-built Hackintosh images, such as the 1151 DMG, the upgrade to High Sierra was especially risky. Those images often included custom kexts and patched system files that would be overwritten during the update, leaving the system unbootable. The safest approach was to perform a clean install of High Sierra on a separate volume and migrate data manually, rather than attempting an in-place upgrade.

By late October 2017, Lilu 1.2.1 and WhateverGreen 1.0.1 had fixed most of the early bugs, and the Hackintosh community had documented the required patches for every major motherboard. But the September 2017 release remains a turning point: it marked the end of the "just copy the kexts and go" era, and the beginning of the rigorous version-matching that persists in modern Hackintosh builds.