I fixed the SK hynix PC711 kernel panic on macOS 12–15 — PC711Probe is now public
I have released PC711Probe, a Lilu plugin that fixes the `IONVMeFamily` Identify-timeout kernel panic affecting the SK hynix PC711 (`1C5C:174A`) on older macOS versions.
The controller itself reaches Ready state, but the first Identify command never completes through the old interrupt path. Comparing `IONVMeFamily` with macOS 26 showed that Apple changed the MSI-X initialization sequence. PC711Probe applies the relevant interrupt setup before Apple’s driver initializes the controller: on Darwin 20–22 it requests one MSI-X vector during early PCI matching, while on Darwin 23–24 it requests MSI-X and clears the old interrupt-path selector during interrupt-source creation. Apple `IONVMeFamily` remains the actual NVMe driver and continues to handle queues, Identify, namespaces and storage I/O.
Recovery boot is verified on macOS 11–14. A complete macOS 15.6.1 installation, normal system boot, namespace/partition publication, PCIe 3.0 x4 link, reported TRIM support, S.M.A.R.T. status, and a 2766.1/3005.9 MB/s write/read benchmark are verified on the tested PC711. On macOS 15.7.9, the same drive also passed 96 GiB of sequential write/read/two-pass SHA-256 validation, dual 8 GiB parallel I/O, 20,000 small-file operations, three sleep/wake cycles, three reboots, and APFS verification without a panic, NVMe timeout, I/O error, media loss, or hash mismatch.
Source and download: https://github.com/hrx114514x/PC711Probe