Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

I read a thread that said to direct connect all audio devices to the computer/laptop including external monitors. (I put the OSK docking station aside and I used a small dongle with my iPhone attached to use CAMO Reincubate). I haven't had the kernel panic or windowserver or manycam or camo or spindump or zoom crashes (I can't remember the others) since. I'm crossing my fingers. I ran Zoom for 3 hours last night and no crashes but before I was getting dropped by Zoom while live several times with app crashes using ManyCam or Camo as the alleged culprits according to Console. I'm trying to setup my computer for streaming with Streamlabs. I have Windows on my Mac for that because Catalina kept crashing and I don't get the crashes with Windows on my late 2015 iMac 27in. However, if these crashes were due to the docking station and not any of the alleged culprits assigned by Console then I've wasted 4 weeks and money to try to resolve my issue. Reinstalling Catalina several times hasn't helped anything. I too experienced the same crashes after a fresh install but my docking station was attached at the time and I was trying to install Zoom and a C920 Logitech webcam...immediate crash. So, NO issues thus far after complete direct connections to my iMac and NO docking station but a dongle to give me one more USB. I'm very limited without a docking station but the crashes were constant and everyday/several times a day with the causes being all over the place according to Console. I did a MEMTEST too and it's not the RAM. Also, I didn't have these issues before using a docking station. I will update if I experience no crashes.

Docking Station used: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CB4RWRV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Hey everybody! Just wanted to come back with an update on my situation which I have finally resolved in the hopes that maybe my experience can be of benefit to somebody else. Because these problems seem so varied in their root causes, here's the specifics on my system and what I did prior to finally finding the magic bullet for my system (if you want to skip to the resolution, I've marked it out below):

Late 2012 21" iMac 3.1 GHz core i7

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 ram (factory installed)

1 TB fusion drive

Nvidia GeForce GT 650M 512 MB

No external monitors or other devices aside from some drives

It never had any problems of any kind all the way through Mojave. I updated it to Catalina 10.15.2 in December 2019 and kept it up to date without any problems into March 2020. Then with the 19E266 build of 10.15.3 which I installed on March 28, 2020 everything fell apart. I was getting 40-50 kernel panics per day and when it wasn't panicking, it was hanging leaving me to look at a beach ball for 5-10 minutes before then panicking. All the reports showed the watchdogD timer as the cause of the panic but, of course as we all know, that's just a countdown timer and something deeper in the system is the true cause.

I fought with it off and on for a few months because I've never met a Mac I couldn't fix before but it never got any better. Finally I gave up, wiped the system clean and did a full clean install of Mojave 10.14.6. Unfortunately, this did not solve the problems fully. It did reduce my kernel panics to about 3-5 per day but the computer was constantly hanging such that it was completely unusable. I could get maybe 10-15 minutes out of it occasionally if I was really careful not to make it angry. Apple suggested the problem was non-standard RAM but the RAM was factory installed. Then it was external devices but I had long prior disconnected all of them. Then the logic board supposedly was the cause at which point I called BS. I also had Linux and Windows 10 installed on this machine and when I would boot into either one, the computer ran perfectly. I ran a full slate of hardware tests and all the hardware checked out okay. I was ready to give up on MacOS.

Here's the resolution part:

Then one day I decided to beat my head against the brick wall again and booted it into MacOS 10.14.6 and started doing some troubleshooting. It immediately began hanging again but as I was working with it, I noticed an odd pattern--all my hangs had the timing and feel of a page file issue--like the computer was dumping stuff from RAM to a page file every time it accessed the disk. I checked the system monitor and my RAM usage was very low but I did see read/write disk spikes every time there was a hang. I started to suspect there might be a disk issue that my hardware tests just weren't finding. So, I took a new 1TB Samsung QVO SSD I had just bought, put it in my drive dock, ran a clean install of Mojave 10.14.6 onto it, changed my boot drive to the docked SSD, booted it up, and... TA-DA! (as my 4 year old would yell), it was perfect! It booted instantly, ran perfectly, and was faster than it has ever been in its entire existence! It has been over a month now since I did that and in that time I have had 0 panics, 0 hangs, rebooted twice just to avoid thunderstorms. Sleep/wake is fine. All external devices are fine. I've added an external display which is fine. Everything just works--the way a Mac is supposed to be!

I know this is merely one anecdotal report of my particular case, but my suspicion is that apple changed some low-level code or EFI stuff that effectively made MacOS unusable with fusion drives. I know they said Catalina was optimized for SSD storage but I didn't realize that meant nonSSD storage was now dead as far as system drives go. Maybe I'm off base and I just got lucky but if your situation sounds at all similar to mine, I'd try doing a clean install on an external SSD and see if it helps you too.

Good luck to everybody--I know this has been an absolutely maddening issue for all of us.

Some hopeful news on my front!

My crashes were coming like clockwork every 760 seconds or so. I want to restate: It was nothing like this before the last Catalina security update I installed a few days ago.

I started disconnecting items. Disconnecting my Drobo 5c made no difference. Disconnecting my external drive enclosure (OWC TB3 ThunderBay 8) made no difference. Disconnecting 2 of my 5 monitors by removing an OWC Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock w/HDMI 2.0 made no difference. (I have worked with three monitors with this iMac from day one with no problems, but I recently added 2 more monitors in other parts of my studio for ergonomics.)

However, I have a UAD card in an external closure (Sonnet Echo Express SE1 Thunderbolt 3 Expansion Chassis). I removed that, and there have been NO crashes overnight!! I suspect this may be the issue as running the UAD card in the enclosure has mostly been set and forget, but there is the occasional unexplained “hiccup.” But again, nothing like constant crashing before the Apple Catalina security update the other day.

My game plan now is to begin reattaching things one at a time to test for stability. I am going to start with an update of the UAD software to the latest version and reattach the enclosure to see what happens. I really don’t want to have to walk away from my UAD plugins considering their utility and the investment!

Even if I get that to work, I’ll detach it and connect another piece solo to test. Once I’m sure which ones work ok in isolation, I’ll reattach those. (Well, at least I know what I’ll be doing most of Christmas Day!)

I don’t know if you have an analogous piece of equipment but, if you do, give it a hard look!

Best regards, George

Turns out it was an SMC thing. Reset SMC and see if it continues to happen. I recently did this and it's been solid ever since.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

For me one thing that helped was turning off hardware acceleration on google chrome. That was causing crashes when I used chrome previously regardless of my monitor setup.

I had the same problem with my iMac, and after resetting the NVRAM, it seems better.

To perform the NVRAM reset , at power-up press, Cmd-Opt-P-R ( all 4 keys at the same time) machine will play the boot sound( twice) and release the keys.

Hopefully you find this helpful

This issue has NOT been resolved. Tech support told me they were aware of the problem and would try to address it in the next build. (promises, promises...)

Suggested workarounds:

• Someone suggested leaving Terminal open. However, this did not work for me.
• Leave a movie running in QuickTime player (set it to loop). This does work for me. As long as it's running my MacBook is rock solid and won't give me a watchdog timeout error.

[My system: 2018 MacBook Pro w Touch Bar 2.9 GHz 6-core Intel Core i9 , 32 GB RAM and a Radeon Pro Vega 20. I use my MacBook in clamshell mode, driving 3 Dell 2408 monitors.]

Since removing Google Drive File Stream, I haven't had a single lock. I worked the system hard today, doing tasks that could trigger 1 - 3 lockups easily. Not sure if that will help your situation, but give it a try.

I suspect Google Drive File Stream is trying to obtain a lock or using a semaphore and it works differently in Catalina (bug) to cause a lock when the app is also trying to do the same thing.

Quick update: tried the 'keep Terminal window open at all times' approach and did not work for me. I have now changed my power settings to never turn off display so computer never sleeps. Not the method that I prefer at all, but no more crashes.

Looks like for me it was the display link driver causing this problem. Can’t remember why I even installed it but after uninstalling it my Mac was not off this morning for the first time in a long time. Might be still too early to determine, idk.

I'm up todate on the beta release and running 10.15.3 Beta (19D62e), still having issues. But disabling power management has stopped the crashes and kept the system up. Currently managed 8 days.

Ohh and keeping terminal open does nothing for me either.

Open a video in Quicktime player and set it to loop. As long as it's running, I've experienced no watchdog timeout: no successful checkin demo com.apple.WindowServer" errors. YMMV

Jim @ ttop wrote:

I had two long phone sessions with Apple Care. They acknowledged the issue and relayed they'd try to have this addressed in the next incremental upgrade. In the meantime, I did find a workaround to stop the crashes (as first mentioned by a previous poster in this thread):

Open a video in Quicktime player and set it to loop. As long as it's running, I've experienced no watchdog timeout: no successful checkin demo com.apple.WindowServer" errors. YMMV

We've had nothing but troubles, a team of various MBP users with external 4k monitors via TB hub.

ABOVE SOLUTION WORKS.

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 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.

a huge issue for me is when I have hardware acceleration enabled on any apps, that causes a lot of bugs for me. Apps like Spotify, Chrome, Zoom all have acceleration as options that I've turned off. Things have been better (not perfect) since then.