Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

Just as another data point, I have had Spotlight largely disabled since forever (via MacintoshHD added to the sysprefs privacy excludes) and I have not had these crashes since the 10.15.6 update.

Hello,

juste happened again, on my MBP 15" 2019, macOS 10.15

It has been 3-4 times it happens when I am launching Intel Power Gadget, that is monitoring CPU activity and temperature.

It seems not being always the case, but I will stop using it until further updates.

Some of you are using this little utility tool also ?

I suspect these panic crashes have to do with 32-bit software and not necessarily a bug. It would explain why the cpu panic symptom is showing up for so many but there's no clear defining, consistent, repeatable hardware or software config, or attached hardware, that is common between folks having this issue.

Same problem here.

Macbook pro 15' 2014, 16GB, 1TB ssd.

Computer hangs with a unresponsive beach ball, then restarts itself and the error report says problems with Watchdog.

This happens to me since I installed the second Catalina OS update (10.15.1). I can force this to happen by launching a high CPU consuming python process from terminal. It hangs after about one hour of processing if unattended (with jolt of caffeine enabled to avoid auto sleep). When using the mac simultaneously with the process, the hang is less predictable, but it happens eventually. Once a day at least. The symptoms are the same: unresponsive beach ball, touchpad movement responsive for a while (no left or right buttons working), then loss of movement and I have to force restart.

I've just unistalled a cpu temperature monitor, because while running this process temperature always elevates and maybe this fun control program has something to to with the hanging. Still trying to learn exact symptoms. In my case only the laptop monitor. Never saw this problem by using monitor + apple TV mirroring.

Thanks for the update. I have an iMac (Late 2015) with the 10.15.1 on it. I have had crashes at a rate of about 2 to 3 per day. I also have a Mac Book Pro 2019 with 16 gig memory factory installed and the developer version of Catalina 10.15.2 beta and I have not had any crash issues.

Multiple people observe that their Catalina OS crashes in correlation to the use of Multiple Monitors, but I do not use multiple monitors on my iMac, only the MacBook Pro uses 1 external LG monitor and an iPad 12'9" Pro 2nd Generation in Side Car mode. The Mac Book Pro has not crashed - ever.

Based on your report, it seems that the Apple developers are aware of the problem and are taking active steps to correct the problem.

As a side note, my iMac was at the end of the Warrantee period and Apple Support changed out the Hard Drive and the Wireless Card, but those hardware changes did not fix the problem. As a final resolve we downgraded the OS back to Mojave 10.14.6 which has not had the crashing problem ever.

I guess I need to wait till the 10.15.2 Catalina is commercial release.

I had the same issue with Mojave.

It keeps happening with Catalina, and it is highly reproductible when I compile large packages in the make stage when I use the "-j" flag (that instructs make to parallelise the tasks).

The good thing with Catalina is that the activity monitor shows the GPU activity.

I formed the hunch this is a race condition between different applications that leverage the GPU concurrently, when I observed that while the UI was frozen (display, mouse, keyboard), the compilation was able to finish before the machine would reboot by itself (most probably a reboot triggered by the watchdog).

Two additional conjectures:

• We could avoid a number of reboots if we find a system preference that sets the infamous 140 seconds delay before watchdog reboots the machine.
• A software or firmware update from Apple is needed to fix the issue.

I also updated to 10.15.2 and I'll get the Panic crash unless I manually put my computer to sleep or shutdown at night. Doesn't happen when screen saver starts, so it must be when the system actually goes to sleep on it's own.

Coming to the end of the line for my 2013 Mac Pro, but I'm not shelling out $6k + for a new Mac Pro if I can expect this level of support from Apple.

I was crashing non stop, and tried leaving terminal open and for now... somehow... I have not crashed. For now I will leave it set to launch at start up and hopefully this will tide me over until they update this bug.

This has been happening since I bought the new MBP 16 with Catalina. Have downloaded OS updates the day the came out and keep updated with public releases.

Crashes happen only when my LG external displays are plugged in, does not crash when they are not.

An interesting finding of mine has been that crashes do not happen when I am in Safe Mode or logged in as another User (I created a Test User account and changed no settings to test) even with the LG external displays plugged in.

Apple Support suggests I just use the other user account and not my main one. Which I do not necessarily appreciate as a solution, particularly since I can easily replicate the crash and is being experienced by many others.

Will try the 'keep a Terminal window open' workaround for now...

No common denominator for me.

None of the workarounds offered have made any difference to my simple setup. Fresh install, one monitor, no sleep, terminal always open with never ending stuff running, and so on.

Without any change of configuration my machine started to beachball, freeze, and reboot several times a day after doing it once a day for several weeks.

WindowServer is the culprit. The logs say so. End of the story.

There may be several bugs there, and several aggravating triggers. Granted.

It's human to try and get rid of the triggers to be able to get anything done, but at some point it's pure masochism to try and fix the unfixable. Or a vocation may be? The path to sanity is a full reinstall of an older operating system that is known to work just fine. I don't care about the bells and whistles. I just want Mail, Safari, Xcode, the occasional Pages and Keynote, and more than that, I want long winded processes that make the CPUs get red-white and the fan blow like **** to run uninterrupted for several days or weeks until completion. Right now Catalina is a no-no for that kind of job, and yes it smells like Windows until 2003. I simply refused to work with Windows since, and my last taste of it last week made me recoil in horror.

At least we have known OSX versions that are rock solid like Windows has never been.

Use your Time Machine backups and go back in time!

First it will you get up and running again, as if you were waking up from a bad dream.

Second, Apple will get a set back in their sales forecasts, because new OS mean new machines out of the door while old OSes mean longer ownership.

I have a Mac mini so no internal display, just two external LG displays. So nots are it is graphics switching.

In the early days, I believe changing the screen saver from source Catalina to Landscapes stop the crashes.... Maybe time to go back and see if that still works.

So a little more diagnosis on my one .... Mac Pro (iBin cylinder), 1xDisplayLink 4K, 1 x HDMI 1080p

I changed how I use the machine and have been running the 4k Screen on HDMI only (change of connector and single display). Using the the Mac Pro for programming/admin and video encoding work and pushing video replay to another machine.

I managed 4 days without a WindowsServer hang crash! (I was getting 1-2 an hour)

Streaming from a local rtsp source, and local files, a 1080 Video in VLC, and the machine hung within 30 minutes with the WindowsServer timeout. VLC thinks it was still playing in the background as audio was still playing until the watchdog kicked in. So as others have suggested it's only the WindowsServer that's hanging.

Interestingly video clips from websites inside Safari seem to have no affect.

I am now going to return to the original screen configuration (4k on DisplayLink and 1080p on HDMI) and try and keep off the video playback to see what happens.

Wondering if it's a graphics card overheating issue? Same error as everyone else is seeing but nothing to do with power saving. Are people running high load graphics on pretty screensavers?

Mark

I'm also experiencing crashes (watchdog time out etc.) after unplugging the external monitor (connected via a Apple USB-C HDMI converter). After multiple crashes and much debugging of different setups, it seems to me like Catalina is not updating the Window management to detect the external display is being unplugged as I can see that the windows are not moving into my Macbook screen and it thinks there's still an external display connected (as seen in Settings>Display). I'm downgrading back to Mojave via a tedious erase/restore. I've reported this here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251048307?page=1

I've also filed a bug report via Apple Feedback (link won't work as Feedback is not an open system) https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/7547651

When I read the other reports, I find it very strange that my crashes are removed since 10.15.4. I haven't had a crash for 3-4 days of continuous use. With 10.15.3 I had at least 3 crashes a day.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)

4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

16 GB 1867 Mhz DDR3

AMD Radeeon R9 M395 2 GB

Second Monitor - Erazer 32 Zoll UHD per HDMI

The only way I could avoid the watchdog timeout crash was to keep a Quicktime movie looping in the background. (I tried all sorts of other things from flashing RAM to keeping terminal open but nothing worked.) However when I plugged in an eGPU, the problem went away. Certainly this is not an ideal solution, but it works (and I have speedier graphics).

FYI I'm running OS 10.15.4 on a 2018 15" Touch Bar MacBook with 32 GB of RAM Pro Vega 20 with a One World Computing eGPU containing a Radeon RX 5700 XT.