Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

And it crashed this morning not too long after starting up Microsoft Teams, which is the dominant time during which my MBP normally crashed for this problem. I've now turned re-unchecked "Enable Power Nap" and "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" to see if that helps. Might not know until Monday since I'm done with Teams meetings for today...

Disallowing the laptop from going to sleep using "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" does prevent the crash, but that's a ridiculous solution. I just burn monitor power when the laptop is idle?

Noah Morah - That's what they told me, after I done everything they asked to trouble shoot including wiping the hard drive and reinstalling from scratch (twice!). They finally took the laptop for a week and replaced the logic board. It had ABSOLUTELY NO effect on the problem. The same problem is still there exactly as before and completely reproducible in seconds. I doubt they even found a problem that required the logic board to be swapped they probably just did it assuming it would fix the problem.

Still died after reconnecting dual monitors with two individual DisplayPort to USB-C cables (removing the dual monitor adapter), and also unchecking "Put hard disks to sleep..." AND also keeping caffeinate running in a terminal.

I've now abandoned my dual monitor setup with this MBP 15" 2018 running Catalina 15.6, and gone back to my ultra-stable MBP 15" 2013 running Mojave 14.6. At least I can still vnc to the MBP 15" 2018 running off to the side with no monitors.

Ugh...

I have two Mac Minis that I run as headless servers, both started exhibiting this behavior after upgrading to 10.15.6. I never ran into this before, so I thought it was a problem with this latest version of the OS. But now after reading this thread and others, I'm seeing the problem has existed quite a bit longer. I'm not sure why it just started happening for me.

As I said, I was using these as headless servers so there is no monitor or keyboard attached. I purchased a couple HDMI display emulators, to trick the Minis into thinking there is a monitor attached, thinking that might help alleviate the situation, but it hasn't made any difference.

On one computer (Mac Mini Late 2012) the crash and reboot happens multiple times a day, usually once overnight and 1 or 2 more times throughout the day. On the other one (Mac Mini 2018) the crashes happen less frequently, usually once every day or two.

I've read that one possible solution is to display Power Nap. I did that on both, but the 2012 mini still crashed today after making that change. So I don't think that is the solution. I've also read others post about issues with external monitors connected to a MacBook Pro, but that obviously doesn't apply in my case.

Hoping against hope that someone might have a solution, but moreso, I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus. Hopefully someone at Apple will take notice, and we'll get a fix sooner than later.

It appears that macOS 10.15.6 doesn't like virtual imaging software so much.

After installing the latest versions of VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion Pro the system refuses to shut down & reboot: it hangs for a half of an hour and crashes with a "watchdog timeout" kernel panic.

For my MBP running 10.15.6, I think it's the combination of running VMWare Fusion-with-Windows AND MS Teams simultaneously. If I run one or the other alone (with the rest of MS Office running, Apple Mail, Safari, etc), I'm not having crashes. When running them together, my system will always crash in the middle of a MS Teams conference call.

Memory usage increase is pretty standard behaviour; memory that isn't used is, literally, useless.

The kernel will page data in and out of memory to swap space under normal operations, so it's perfectly normal to see memory usage climb over the course of a day until the system begins to run low on free memory and the kernel needs to page some out.

This is especially common if you have a browser open with multiple tabs, all churning some (frequently inefficient) JavaScript which is making a ton of periodic calls to external services

I'd be very wary of jumping to conclusions around memory leaks in relation to this issue.

Hi Guys,

Take a look on this explanation https://communities.vmware.com/message/2973190#2973190

It's exactly what happens to me.

Sound to be (no news) a bug in Catalina. For now i will try to monitor the real memory allocation for kernel_task and do some reboots to try to minimize that.

This may not be a one-size-fits-all situation, but virtualization definitely is a likely factor in my current issues (Macbook Pro - 2019 - 10.15.6). It does NOT only happen with external monitors (in my case), so I ruled out that factor early in my process. Oddly enough, I actually recently requested that my employer purchase VMWare Fusion for me because I was having such major issues with Virtualbox stability (and blamed VBox, not MacOS). I also now have VMWare Fusion running on my older MacBook Pro (2015 -- running 10.15.3 <-- important!!) and it runs 24/7 without any panics/reboots. I am definitely blocking any MacOS upgrades on my old one!! :)

Turning off Spotlight completely, along with unchecking power-saving options, DID seem to give me slight improvement with my newer MBPro, but maybe this is simply related to overall memory management, and how quickly MacOS needs to go into "panic mode".

Thanks for passing that link along -- definitely makes me think that this may be the ultimate root cause. Would be very interested to see if virtualization is a common denominator with other folks experiencing these constant kernel panics and watchdog timeouts on Catalina 10.15.6.

Memory (then panics, timeouts, reboots, etc.) issues caused by Catalina 10.15.6 and virtualization software (VMWare, VirtualBox, Docker):

VMWare Community Forum link provided earlier by user sergiorru (thanks!):

https://communities.vmware.com/message/2973190#2973190

After 4 days of crash-free operation, my MBPro *did* crash during the night, and when I restarted the next morning, it was the watchdog timeout crash report. And I did have VMWare Fusion running at the time of crash (although I am 90% certain that it was only the management app, not an actual VM running, so that really should not have triggered any memory leaks). So while 10.15.5 downgrade does appear to improve things, it definitely is not a "silver bullet" to make all of the issues go away completely. Definitely interested in hearing more "Big Sur" reports over the coming days, but the last thing I want to consider is jumping into another quick upgrade only to run into more/different unexpected issues. At this point, if I can work 3-4 days between crashes, I can live with it (and how sad it is to even have to say that with an Apple product...). But definitely better than daily crashes!

@Monkeyman8 i use teams everyday and you can watch the memory use increase continously over the period of days. I once let it reach 6G of ram. You restart it and it returns to about 780M. I've remained on 10.15.1 because i could see the issues unfolding with Catalina and also initially identified that the kernel panics where related to firmware updates. My Mac does panic every few days and to ensure i can reliably (almost) make it through a day without loosing everything I need to shut it down every single night. I've spent 12 months looking for a solution but have resolved to the point this is the reliability level of Apple MACOS. My windows machine has not been rebooted in 2 months but my Mac has to be every day to assure my work products last through the OS instability. Microsoft Surface is looking like my next mobile device due to the reluctance of Apple to correct Catalina.

I started using gfx.io and trying to keep it on my integrated graphics for the macbook 16 inch (vs. using the graphics card) and that has helped. I wonder if that plays into the problem for some people here. Others, I know, are using computers without gpu's.

I have a 16 inch macbook with a Radeon Graphics Card. I've been using an application to ensure that the computer doesn't switch to the Radeon (and uses the integrated graphics card instead) and I haven't had any crashes. Fwiw you might want to try that.

Coming up to 12 months since original post. 35 pages here and lots more in other threads. Still no fix from Apple. I agree it looks EFI related. As Apple offer no way of installing EFI aligned with the MACOS that your installing any use of a new release of the OS changes the EFI. If there is a EFI problem there is never a way to return to stability. Simply even trying a new OS on an external drive results in your MAC firmware being upgraded. If that firmware is faulty then your existing previous system becomes unstable. This is the reason I stopped updating my MAC. I'm glad I did after catalina killed the logic board. From that point onwards i thought this will not end well. 20 years on a MAC and I'm looking for alternatives as the result of the Apple/Catalina experience on providing customer service. The experience is simply so poor now that the premium price for the device is not worth the cost. Sad....but i see no end in sight. We can have cake on October 9 for the first birthday of this thread and the instability that was bought with Catalina.....35 pages on.