Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

Just thought I contributed to the discussion. I am not a Mac expert at all and I only use my devices for DICOM viewers as what I use is only available for Mac and not Windows, so please excuse if not useful.

I have also had Watchdog crashes pretty much since installing Catalina with various degree of frequency depending on the update pushed out.

I did find though that, if I uninstall chrome, the crashes reduce in frequency dramatically. I.e. with chrome installed, the crashes are about every 5 minutes, while without I had not had a crash all day yesterday.

Just in case some Apple techie is monitoring the thread and this may be helpful, otherwise just ignore it.

I had similar crashes on a brand new Macbook Pro 13 I received on Tuesday this week with the following error:

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f827a0a8d): watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd in 97 seconds (1009 total checkins since monitoring last enabled)

I spoke to Apple Support and they suggest these steps to RESET to laptop:

Shut down the Mac (if not already) but keep it plugged into power.

On your built-in keyboard, press and hold all of the following keys. Your Mac might turn on.

•Control on the left side of your keyboard

•Option (Alt) on the left side of your keyboard

•Shift on the right side of your keyboard

Keep holding all three keys for 7 seconds, then press and hold the power button as well. If your Mac is on, it will turn off as you hold the keys.

Wait a few seconds, then press the power button to turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold these four keys together: Option, Command, P, and R. You can release the keys after about 20 seconds, during which your Mac might appear to restart.

However, I do not think the above really help. The culprit was actually Google Drive File Stream (Google Enterprise Drive client) - which apparently conflicted with Spotlight indexing and when the drive was being updated.

So I uninstalled Google Drive File Stream, and used Insync Client instead (https://www.insynchq.com/) [I have a lifetime license as I have Linux desktops which need access to my Google drive].

So far - no crashes - even under heavy load of 3 virtual machines, background files being updated and Zoom/GoogleHangouts video calls.

Been rock stable the last 2 days.

Hope this helps for those having the same problems.

Cheers!

I continue to have the same problem on my iMac 4K late 2015, I'm convinced that it is generated by an error on graphics driver, in fact sometimes it doesn't freeze but there are artifact on screen and the menu on top disappears.

I hope the update will solve this matter soon, because it became unusable.... I started to think about Microsoft could be better... oh no...

Google Drive File Stream may indeed be the cause.

Since upgrading to Catalina (fresh install on iMac 5K 2015, SSD swap)

GDFS is painfully slow.

Opening a small .psd file on google drive makes photoshop freeze for 10 seconds, same happens when saving.

This did not happen when I was on Mojave. it was almost instantaneous. (both off/online files)

I hope this isn't a case of Apple blaming Google and not taking any action.

"...Opening a small .psd file on google drive makes photoshop freeze for 10 seconds, same happens when saving.

..."

What happens if you download the file first then open it? You have to include the possibility that PS and GDFS have a problem working together in the Catalina environment.

What takes 10 seconds? The download or the opening?

Does it cause a crash?

I continually get these same panic codes and restarts. My restarts happen sometime while my MBP is idle, but most of the time it is when I am ripgrep'ing throw my file system and I attempt to Control-C out of the search my mouse and everything else becomes unresponsive. When this happens the panic results and a restart happens.

In my case MacBook Pro 2018 with two monitors connected with Caldigit T3 Plus still having the same crashes after installing macOS 10.15.

Not sure what else to try after a complete macOS reinstallation and Caldigit firmware update. This issue has been happening since Catalina beta 1 and, most likely at this point, will be left behind. Hopefully macOS 10.16 addresses this problem from the beginning.

Just installed 10.15.5 and still no chance to cleanly shut down my MBP 16”. Dock disappears now (yeah, wow...) but it still freezes and will then reboot, even with my intention to turn the Mac off. Also sleep / wake issues still exist. In resume, what a crap!

I updated to 10.15.5 with no success with the kernel failures. But read on as I seem to have found a solution to give my late 2013 iMac a second life...

I am now convinced the problem, at least in my case, relates to Fusion Drive. Here is why:

I bought a Samsung T5 external USB3 SSD drive and used the Mac OS recovery to install the OS in it - it is now my boot drive. I have had zero issues with kernel panics. For days. As a bonus, the system is now faster than using the ****** Fusion drive. This is a $80 / $160 fix that is much cheaper than trying to open my iMac to replace the (potentially damaged) Fusion drive - and doesn't require that I fight with opening this all-in-one.

I think something related to the new setup of disks for Catalina is, in my admittedly non-expert opinion, more sensitive to disk issues than the previous versions of Mac OS. Mind that when I run disk utility on the internal disk, it accuses no errors - but the fact remains that the disks are extremely slow and the system is unusable when I boot from the internal HD, while it is completely fine when I boot from a fast USB SSD.

I suppose it is also possible that the process of conversion to Catalina has damaged my install to a point that it needs to be reformatted, not just reinstalled. The problem is that I have data in that drive that needs to be copied out first - so I'm in the process of using a second external drive and copying data from the internal drive to it. While this is slow it hasn't presented the kernel panics - probably because the OS is running from a different disk.

After my data is safe, I'll try reformatting the internal Fusion drive and starting from scratch, and I'll update this trail.

Just an FYI, this was happening to me on Mojave as well. I upgraded to Catalina in hopes of getting rid of the problem, but it persisted. It now seems to only happen with Google Chrome, but it's happened in Safari and other processes as well. It's a Kernel Panic and Mac restart. All resulting reports have given me different corresponding processes that caused the panic in the crash reports. My setup is a 2019 iMac-27 with a 2TB PCI-based SSD internal drive, top tier CPU/GPU (8GB of GPU RAM) with 40 GB of standard RAM (8 Apple factory, 32 OWC). My point is, this isn't just a Catalina issue. My Mac is only 6 months old and I'm afraid to to do any work on it (word processing) from fear of losing it in a random crash. Apple seems to be oblivious of this issue, telling me this is the first they've heard. My issue has persisted since I first got it last October. The first one they sent me had the issue much worse and they had me send it back. IMO, Apple software is suffering from fatal flaws from sub-par engineers. This never-ending issue never would've happened under Steve Jobs watch.

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f8b1a1ad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (5540 seconds ago): 555, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (5510 seconds ago): 536, last successful checkin: 120 seconds ago

Time machine set to manual, all 4 ports taken: external monitor connected directly by type-c to DisplayPort cable + Hub with USBs + External HDD with Time Machine + Charger

We have the same problem here as well.

Macbook air, mid 2012

OS: Catalina 10.15.5

The system freezes and restarts frequently when what we are doing is just playing a youtube video. Because of frequent freezing and restart, the laptop has become almost not usable. Shocked to learn so many people have the same problem. Hope Apple can release a fix soon.

Sorry to hear others are still having this problem. Seems to be cleared up on my system.

I did talk to someone I know (not in the kernel group) to get some attention on this. He said the best steps are to get "sysdiagnose" done during the problem and submit it with a bug report. Apparently those are quite helpful.

If you haven't yet I suggest you do so.

When I tried, sysdiagnose via command key was hanging. (sysdiagnose can be triggered by pressing Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+Shift+Period). But I found if I had the terminal open and ran it via CLI then I could get it to finish and send the details to apple.

Peter Galvin wrote:

He said the best steps are to get "sysdiagnose" done during the problem and submit it with a bug report. Apparently those are quite helpful.

Hi, at last some positive feedback in the silence :-)

Did by any chance he say that they'd like the sysdiagnose during the freeze or after the timeout/reboot? I only ask as my UI hangs completely so I'd have to do this from SSH CLI from elsewhere.

Thanks

Same problem dual monitors attached and time machine running. Happens even during active use.

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff7f862f9ad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.logd in 120 seconds

service returned not alive with context : unresponsive dispatch queue(s): com.apple.firehose.io-wl

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (1940 seconds ago): 183, last successful checkin: 120 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (1910 seconds ago): 191, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

Backtrace (CPU 1), Frame : Return Address

0xffffff920eabb720 : 0xffffff800571f5cd

0xffffff920eabb770 : 0xffffff8005858b05

0xffffff920eabb7b0 : 0xffffff800584a68e

0xffffff920eabb800 : 0xffffff80056c5a40

0xffffff920eabb820 : 0xffffff800571ec97

0xffffff920eabb920 : 0xffffff800571f087

0xffffff920eabb970 : 0xffffff8005ec2858

0xffffff920eabb9e0 : 0xffffff7f862f9ad5

0xffffff920eabb9f0 : 0xffffff7f862f97fa

0xffffff920eabba10 : 0xffffff8005e54aae

0xffffff920eabba60 : 0xffffff7f862f8cfe

0xffffff920eabbb60 : 0xffffff8005e5dcd3

0xffffff920eabbca0 : 0xffffff80058082b2

0xffffff920eabbdb0 : 0xffffff8005725328

0xffffff920eabbe10 : 0xffffff80056fbcc5

0xffffff920eabbe70 : 0xffffff8005712aa2

0xffffff920eabbf00 : 0xffffff8005830d05

0xffffff920eabbfa0 : 0xffffff80056c6226

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.driver.watchdog(1.0)[B435C72B-B311-3C67-8AA1-1D5CE0FAD429]@0xffffff7f862f8000->0xffffff7f86300fff

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: watchdogd

Mac OS version:

19F96