Can be used as a stand-alone bootable image (e.g. on a USB stick), or as a tool from UEFI Shell or OpenCore bootloader.
The idea is to let you quickly set some useful nvram values which would normally require booting all the way into macOS recovery.
Features:
-
You can very quickly do the equivalent of
csrutil enable/disable(Big Sur or Catalina settings) -
You can quickly set
nvram boot-args="-no_compat_check"; which may be the only setting you need after installation, to run Big Sur on an only slightly incompatible Mac -
You can quickly set/clear
StartupMute- this doesn't require Recovery mode to set normally; I just found it useful to add it here -
There is also a basic - but hopefully useful - ability to list and view the value of every variable stored in your Mac's nvram
Download the current release zip file.
Copy the entire EFI folder from the zip file into the root of any FAT32 USB drive. No other files on the drive need to be deleted. If you boot up your Mac while holding down Alt/Option then you should see your USB drive listed as 'Boot Helper', and you can boot from it to start the utilty.
Try pressing the labelled keys to see what they do. None of them modify anything which can do any harm. All the nvram keys toggle their settings, i.e. press once to set; press again to unset.
Changing the value of csr-active-config and rebooting is the same thing as using csrutil enable/disable from Recovery and rebooting.
If you find the tool really useful, you could consider making a tiny (e.g. 20MB) FAT32 partition on your hard drive, and installing it there, so that it is permanently available. Again, the entire EFI directory can be copied to the root of any FAT32 (or FAT16, if it's small) partition, and should just work.
To use as an OpenCore tool, copy EFI/BOOT/BootHelper.efi into the EFI/OC/Tools of an existing OpenCore boot disk, and then configure this as a tool in the Tools section of EFI/OC/config.plist (following the pattern of any existing tools in there).
BootHelper.efi can also be run from OpenCore Open Shell or any other UEFI Shell, if you already have one configured.
These are just the settings I wanted to be able to change quickly. I am hoping to find the time to write additional code against OpenCore's plist library, in order to allow a BootHelper.plist file, which would let you configure the quick settings which you find most useful.
The code now compiles in a normal EDK 2 environment, and I'm in the process of linking to the OpenCore libraries I want to use.
The first versions of the code up to this tag were built in EDK 1 and compile fine just with gcc on Linux against the basic EDK 1 header files, with these prerequisites.
Later version of the code up to this tag were built using VisualUefi for Windows - which is a helpful stepping stone between EDK 1 and the full EDK 2 development environment. If the project did not link against various parts of OpenCore, there'd be no real reason not to leave in the VisualUefi support and have the project buildable in both VisualUefi and EDK 2; since it does, it's almost certainly not sensible to do the additional work required to make VisualUefi build the required parts of OC (especially since OC itself is likely to change more, and more often, than the EDK2 library).
If you want to play around with this ealier, Windows-compilable (i.e. VisualUefi) version of the code, you are strongly recommended to use git with core.autocrlf set to true because the line endings in the repo are LF.
The earliest (EDK 1) version was inspired by and based on Barry K. Nathan's setvars program from the big-sur-micropatcher; since then the project has been completely re-written and now does much more, much more configurably, than setvars so I hope it's a reasonable decision to treat it as a separate project.
Earlier versions had code copied from OpenCore for entering console mode which was used, and made available here, under the BSD license. We are now correctly linking to OC and letting it start console mode for us. Next, we are hoping to get OC to read plist files for us, too. Thank you, OC!