Tools and Applications

Standalone tools may help to debug firmware and hardware. Some of the known tools are listed below. While some tools can be launched from within OpenCore (Refer to the Tools subsection for more details), most should be run separately either directly or from Shell.

To boot into OpenShell or any other tool directly save OpenShell.efi under the name of EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI on a FAT32 partition. It is typically unimportant whether the partition scheme is GPT or MBR.

While the previous approach works both on Macs and other computers, an alternative Mac-only approach to bless the tool on an HFS+ or APFS volume:

sudo bless --verbose --file /Volumes/VOLNAME/DIR/OpenShell.efi \ --folder /Volumes/VOLNAME/DIR/ --setBoot

Note 1: /System/Library/CoreServices/BridgeVersion.bin should be copied to /Volumes/VOLNAME/DIR.

Note 2: To be able to use the bless command, disabling System Integrity Protection is necessary.

Note 3: To be able to boot Secure Boot might be disabled if present.

Some of the known tools are listed below (builtin tools are marked with *):

BootKicker* - Display Apple BootPicker menu (for Macs with compatible firmware). ChipTune* - Test BeepGen protocol and generate audio signals of different style and length. CleanNvram* - Reset NVRAM alternative bundled as a standalone tool. CsrUtil* - Simple implementation of SIP-related features of Apple csrutil. GopStop* - Test GraphicsOutput protocol with a simple scenario. KeyTester* - Test keyboard input in SimpleText mode. MemTest86 - Memory testing utility. OpenControl* - Unlock and lock back NVRAM protection for other tools to be able to get full NVRAM access when launching from OpenCore. OpenShell* - OpenCore-configured UEFI Shell for compatibility with a broad range of firmware. PavpProvision - Perform EPID provisioning (requires certificate data configuration). ResetSystem* - Utility to perform system reset. Takes reset type as an argument: coldreset, firmware, shutdown, warmreset. Defaults to coldreset. RtcRw* - Utility to read and write RTC (CMOS) memory. ControlMsrE2* - Check CFG Lock (MSR 0xE2 write protection) consistency across all cores and change such hidden options on selected platforms. TpmInfo* Check Intel PTT (Platform Trust Technology) capability on the platform, which allows using fTPM 2.0 if enabled. The tool does not check whether fTPM 2.0 is actually enabled.