Mac Pro 5,1 - High Sierra - 970 EVO Plus NVMe on 4x PCIe adapter - getting periodic kernel panic “NVMe: Command timed-out and request found in the completion queue…”
Hi. I’ve been trying to upgrade the storage and RAM in my Mac Pro 5,1 (Mid 2010).
After installing a 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe blade (https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/970evoplus/) in a Micro Connectors Low-Profile M.2 NVMe PCIe x4 adapter (http://microconnectors.com/micro-connectors-low-profile-m-2-nvme-ssd-to-pcie-x4-adapter-with-heat-sink-for-1u )
I am periodically getting the following kernel panic:
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff7f9d993e2b): nvme: " NVMe: Command timed-out and request found in the completion queue \n”@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/IONVMeFamily/IONVMeFamily-356.71.1/IONVMeController.cpp:5184
I can trigger this 100% of the time by running Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the 970 NVMe APFS Volume - during which the Write test will start to ramp up the speedometer (to approx 600-750) and then hang and 15-30 seconds later the Mac Pro reboots.
Periodically the panic will just occur spontaneously without any user interaction with the NVMe volume.
I’ve also copied 100GB of directories/files to/from/within the APFS Volume on the 970 NVMe and sometimes that works ok and sometimes it hits the same stall/timeout/panic.
When running AJA System Test Lite, the write test will sometimes (but not always) stall for 1-2 seconds and then proceed to complete - leaving the write rate in the 700 range rather than 1500 - but it has never done a stall/panic as of yet.
Notes:
- the cMP is quite bare-bones right now (HD 5780 / 1x SATA SSD in HDD tray / 970 NVMe blade in PCIe 4x adapter card / 48GB RAM)
- ROM version is currently 140.0.0.0.0 - I started to update to Mojave and did the corresponding ROM update - but then decided I’d rather have access to the boot screen/options since the HD 5780 gives me sufficient display resolution - so I’m booting High Sierra 10.13.6 from a SSD in a HDD tray right now (eventually will put it in a PCIe/SSD-SATA card)
- There is NO heatsink installed on the 970 NVMe blade - but it is barely warm anyways.
- Panic issue occurs with either the HD 5780 card installed or a GT120 card installed
- Panic issue occurs with either the original 4x 4GB RAM sticks or with the upgraded 3x 16GB RAM sticks in slots 1/2/3 (and I ran memtest overnight with the 16GB sticks without any errors)
- I’ve done a reinstall of High Sierra and also reset NVRAM/SMC multiple times
- I moved the 970 NVMe stick/PCIe-card over to a Win7 box - deleted the partitions (diskpart) - created an NTFS volume - ran Samsung Magician which says the 970 firmware is the Latest - ran the Samsung Magician performance test with no issues - ran the “winsat disk -drive <drive-letter> ” disk performance test a few times with no issues - copied 50GB-100GB of data to/from/within the NVMe volume with no issues - also tried to run the Win version of Blackmagic, but without any actually Blackmagic cards install was unable to select a target drive
- I also tried another Micro Connectors NVME PCIe x4 adapter and the issue still occurs (http://microconnectors.com/m-2-nvme-80mm-ssd-pcie-x4-adapter-with-covered-heat-sink/)
- I do have a Lycom DT-120 M.2 PCIe card arriving tomorrow and will test with that (though I doubt that will resolve things given that it looks to be just a pass-through between the NVMe blade and the MB PCIe x4 slot)
Does anyone have any suggestions on next steps?
Thanks,
Jim
(posting full panic report in the next post - seems to be hitting a 5000 char posting limit)
Anonymous UUID: 0F0C8485-1791-E425-4AEA-25C524345D04
Fri Mar 8 09:06:49 2019
*** Panic Report ***
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff7f9d993e2b): nvme: " NVMe: Command timed-out and request found in the completion queue \n"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/IONVMeFamily/IONVMeFamily-356.71.1/IONVMeController.cpp:5184
Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address
...