Kext For Mac



Most of the notebooks that are releasing today are equipped with intel dual-band wireless cards. As they are not so costly as compared to their counterparts and perform really well in terms of speed and range, they became a perfect choice for notebook manufacturers. However till now, apple macOS doesn’t support these cards natively and also unlike windows, intel doesn’t make drivers for macOS which lefts no choice but to replace the intel wireless card with a supported one. But some manufactures impose wifi card whitelist in BIOS which makes the system un-bootable if the card replace is not whitelisted and also theses replacement cards don’t come with a cheap price tag. Which makes it a dealbreaker while making a Hackintosh notebook.

Kext For Macos Catalina

Kext For Mac

Macos Remove Kext

In 2016 a project was started to make intel wifi card compatible with macOS. The project created a lot of hope in the Hackintosh community however, due to some unknown reason the developer stopped working on the project and left unfinished.

Advanced Mac users may want the ability to install programs, called kext files, to modify basic system information. Kext Drop for Mac, while simple and with limited features, works well for. Kext Utility For Mac Os High Sierra Kinstall A lightweight alternative to Kext Utility for macOS. Since kinstall was made in bash it won't take more than a few bytes on your macOS install, but it will do absolutely the same as Kext Utility or Kext Wizard!

Kext

Recently a developer zxystd (github) again started a project AppleIntelWifiAdapter in which he ported the Intel WiFi kext from OpenBSD Project, The kext was initially only working on macOS Catalina and some selected Intel WiFi models later the dev released another kext called itlwm which is working with all the released macOS versions post macOS sierra and added support for more Intel WiFi cards.

As per the developers GitHub repo, the kexts supports the following Intel WiFi card models:

  • 3xxx: 3160, 3165, 3168
  • 7xxx: 7260, 7265
  • 9xxx：9260, 9461, 9462, 9560
  • 22000：ax200

The kext is currently in the development phase so some of the functions are broken like the wifi card appears as an ethernet connection in settings, so there is no WiFi icon on the toolbar. And also you cannot add new WiFi connections dynamically as the wifi connection details are hardcoded in the kext itself, so in future, after installing the kext if you change your wifi password or name you have to manually edit the wifi kext to make it connect again as of now.

Kext Download

See Also: Best wifi cards for Hackintosh laptop and PC.

Kext for mac os

Also, there are multiple issues reported by users in GitHub however, in my system the kext is working perfectly fine with intel ac7265

How to install Intel WiFi kext in macOS.

Kext Drop For Mac

Macos
  1. Download the itlwm kext from here and also download plist editor if you don’t have already.
  2. Open the kext file by right mouse click and show contents.
  3. Open the info.plist file using plist editor.
  4. Then in IOKitPersonalities > itlwm > WIFIconfig > WIFI_1
  5. Add your wifi name and password. The kext as of now supports a maximum of 5 connections, you can add them in rest of the fields.
  6. . Run the following commands in terminal to load the kext:

Kext Utility For Mac

Hackintosh kext installer

How To Install Kexts Mac

The kext should load just fine and in settings > network tab, you will see a new ethernet connection, which is your wifi card.

Kext Wizard For Mac

Now you got your intel wifi card working on macOS however the above commands only loads the kext for the current session means whenever you shutdown or restart your system you have to enter the commands again to load the kext. To solve the issue you can add the kext into clover/kexts/others folder.

Note: Just to be on the safer side you do not install the kext directly into library/extensions as it might break your system if not loaded correctly. Installing it into clover makes it easy to bypass the kext if an error occurred.