Thunderbolt3Unblocker

Thunderbolt 3 Unblocker

This project provides a kernel extension that unblocks unsupported Thunderbolt 3 peripherals (such as the Razer Core) on macOS.

This accomplishes the same goal as KhaosT's TB3 Enabler, which works by patching IOThunderboltFamily on disk. This kernel extension performs the patch in memory and on-the-fly.

Note there is likely a reason why IOThunderboltFamily considers a peripheral unsupported in the first place. Use at your own peril.

This kernel extension has been tested against macOS Monterey 12 and as far back as macOS Sierra 10.12.6. Please check for open issues before using on other versions, and review the troubleshooting guide.

Installation

Please head over to the Releases page for binaries and installation instructions.

Building

To prepare your development environment, please run

git submodule update --init --recursive
brew install cmake

Build the project with Xcode. Make sure to change code signing settings as appropriate.

Load the kernel extension with:

sudo chown -R root:wheel Thunderbolt3Unblocker.kext
sudo kextload Thunderbolt3Unblocker.kext

If loading the kext fails: Reboot into Recovery Mode and disable kext security restrictions using csrutil enable --without kext.

If you are developing the kext, you should know that the NVRAM variable t3u-incompatible is written whenever there is a panic while loading the kext. The presence of this variable prevents the kext from loading again on the same system version. You may want to disable the code that does this (in Thunderbolt3Unblocker.c), or delete it with nvram -d t3u-incompatible.

xnu_override

This project also implements a simple, reusable in-memory kernel patching library. The author has released it under a permissive license in the hopes that it will be useful.