Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

It was fixed with a supplemental update to 10.15.6 which was available to everyone who had the original 10.5.6 update that contained the bug; everyone downloading 10.15.6 after that supplemental update was released downloaded a new build containing the bug fix. So, naturally, 10.15.7 contains the fix as well.

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

May I suggest that the 32 bit apps can be found in the Legacy Software section in the Mac's report. Acrobat in your screenshot may just need an update to run smoothly in macOS Catalina.

The best way to see if the problems come from an app that is a complementary 32/64 bit runner, is to make a second administrator account (note these apps are not marked incompatible in Applications). After that, logout from your initial admin account and login with the new account. I'll bet you won't be seeing the errors and crashes anymore.

Once logged in with the new account, identify all apps that are from Identified Developer including those labeled as Dowloaded From Internet and check to see if there are any updates available for them online. Some third party apps fail to update or upgrade properly after macOS Catalina upgrade. However, if an app does not have update available to run on macOS Catalina, it is preferred to be uninstalled - just visit app developer's page to find out how the app can be properly removed or, deinstalled.

Hmm interesting, I had both my 4k monitors connected with USB-C to DisplayPort cables and was getting the crash every time the Mac tried to sleep. I've switched both to using USB-C to HDMI and it seems to have resolved the issue.. Will try this for a few more days.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi - I think I have a workaround. I reinstalled Catalina. That did not fix the problem. I deleted the account that is crashing and created a new account. (As the other account on the MacBook is not crashing).

I noticed that the background accountsd or something like that is consuming lot of CPU and memory. It is pulling data from my iCloud for the new account. I disabled photos sync from iCloud. Everything seems very stable now, it did not crash almost the whole day, previously it would have crashed 2 or 3 times by now. I am going to enable photos in iCloud settings tonight and leave it on overnight and see what happens. The new photos is generating something like "moments" that is basically taking over the resources, but that should not crash. The panic message kind of indicating that the resources are swamped, something timed out, trying to make sense of the panic message.

I was having similar issues on my iMac 5k (10.15.1) with similar error messages. After reading this thread I turned off Time Machine backups to my network drive (an external drive attached to a Time Capsule), and since then the iMac has run flawlessly (knock on wood!).

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.