FakeSMC vs VirtualSMC discussion

Hey,

So I'm waiting for MacOS to reinstall on my T460s right now. I was making sure a Lenovo 04X6020 dw1560-alike would work after Dremel-ing a slot in it so it would fit before sending it to someone I sold it to on eBay.

However, I had been using VirtualSMC on my T460s and forgot I needed FakeSMC for the patches to work for dw1560s.

This created a huge clusterfuck of having issues supplanting my former SMC config for reasons I don't understand - I deleted my kext caches and rebuilt them from the recovery partition after replacing VirtualSMC with FakeSMC in /Library/Extensions and have basically a mirror of these kexts on USB in /kexts/Other but nothing seems to work. My system hangs on IOGraphicsFamily triggered rebuild, which seems unrelated but nothing has changed besides this new dw1560-alike card and replacing FakeSMC with VirtualSMC (note: I also made sure to append .NotUsed to virtualSMC.efi in /drivers64UEFI)

But this kind of brings up a bigger question for me

What is the difference between these two SMC hacks, and why would I experience these issues?

Or more broadly, what does the SMC do and why must it be hacked?

I noticed making a hackintosh out of a P8H61-ITX motherboard yesterday that I couldn't get it to boot with FakeSMC but with VirtualSMC it works fine.

My C7Q67 hackintosh however likes FakeSMC better.

WTF? Why?