Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

Same problem after Catalina 10.15.6 (19G73) update...

Configuration:

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)

2,9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

Radeon Pro 560 4 GB

Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Given those odds (and the comments from DOL_Mark that the WatchDog is likely not the primary cause), I probably will not risk this. I'm not afraid of single user mode, but I think the odds are low for success.

My only work-around is to have my MBP15i7 2013 (still a great machine with a superb keyboard) drive the three external monitors, and vnc to the MBP15i9 2018 to run a few demanding apps. Obviously, this would not be a good workaround if I were trying to do video editing, where I would need the MBP15i9 2018 directly connected to external monitors.

I have passed to Catalina 10.15.6 without any improvement, my iMac 21.5" 4K late 2015 continues to crash very often.

My feeling is the problem is caused by video driver, probably an Intel revenge issue :-)

Anyway, my iMac is unusable. I'm very disappointed. I hope this issue will share with other potential customers!!!

Thanks for the comment, @gzazu ... unfortunately I already had that option unchecked, and I'm still getting the kernel panics.

The odd thing with this is, it seems like the recipe is different for different people. What works for some, doesn't work for others. Still trying to figure out what works for me on these CPUs.

Unfortunately 10.15.6 definitely hasn't fixed the issue, but maybe your user behaviour isn't triggering it as much (yet).

I drove away for the entire weekend with my laptop left at home, physically open with the screen locked. Fully expected to come home on Sunday evening to a rebooted login screen with the usual enter password, TouchID disabled after reboot message. But it wasn't, it had sat there the whole time quite happily. Got through yesterday without a freeze and most of today until about 45 minutes ago.

Frankly I'm astonished this isn't getting more public attention. Unlike a separate issue the 2020 13" model that I have has, this issue seems to be affecting users across vast swathes of different hardware profiles; how this was not detected in testing I don't know.

I'm not running VMWare Fusion at all. But I am running VitualBoxVM with an Ubuntu VM. And it happens multiple times per day.

As much as I hate to do this, I'm considering trying to do a timed reboot every couple hours, since that is more elegant than having a crash. I've had a few corrupted databases within the Ubuntu VM, which I've had to restore from a backup. At least with the timed reboot, it would be a graceful shutdown rather than a crash and potentially corrupted files.

Thanks for this suggestion, @danpalmer. I don't use GDFS, but I do have an rclone mount. I don't know if it will help, but at this point, I'm willing to try anything. So I've added the rclone mounted drive to the Spotlight exclusion list, and we'll see if it helps. I'll report back my findings (good or bad).

I've not had any issues with my VMs, although admittedly the only one I've had running in the past few days (constantly, fwiw) is my Docker vm which is using xhyve as the hypervisor, when I get through the work backlog the crashes gave me I'll risk firing up my Virtualbox and VMware Fusion vm's 😅

In Activity Monitor, I've been keeping an eye on the memory usage. Upon reboot, the Wired Memory is at about 2.6GB. Over the course of several hours as I use the machine, it has climbed to 9.6GB (and still climbing). I have tried disabling Spotlight, and several of the other suggestions in this thread, but unfortunately nothing has stopped this from happening.

In all honesty, it hasn't crashed yet today, but I have been spending a lot of time trying to stop this Wired Memory increase, which has included several reboots. So I'm not quite sure what will happen when that number reaches above the available memory, but my guess would be a crash as we've been seeing.

Would be curious to see what other people are seeing in the Wired Memory in Activity Monitor...

Yeah it's the wired memory that I'm concerned about. The only thing running on this machine is Virtualbox with a single Ubuntu VM. It's a Mac Mini that I run without a keyboard or monitor, so there are no browsers running, I don't use it as a desktop machine. I also have a second Mac Mini (a newer model), also with 16GB, that has been running for days, and the wired memory is still only a bit above 2GB.

I'm not sure if this is related or not, but it certainly seems like it points to a problem.

That's very useful thanks, any chance you could drop a link here please?

Despite using both of those regularly the only VM I've had running over the past several days is the xhyve (macOS native hypervisor forked from bhyve on FreeBSD, though you can use any of the others mentioned) one I have for Docker for Mac which hasn't caused any issues since I disabled Spotlight's ability to index Google Drive pseudo-locations.

Neither my VMware nor Virtualbox machines were running before I Mac’s that change but it’s a very useful piece of info nonetheless.

Hi ktalley1015, glad to hear you found a solution that works for you!

Just thought I should sound a note of caution that this problem seems to manifest in a number of different ways for different people. My system NEVER crashed until the day I upgraded from 10.15.4 to 10.15.5, and then it crashed every single time I tried to wake it from sleep (either brief or overnight). Upgrading to 10.15.6 made the problem go away again and my system has not crashed since. I also have a 2019 MBP 15". I assumed the crashes were related to my operating in clamshell mode connected to an external monitor as many others in this thread have reported, but as I never did any testing in non-clamshell mode after the crashes started I suppose that I cannot definitively connect the crashes to clamshelling. I also use Fusion (Linux) but never had any crashes while actively using it (although I usually leave the VM running while sleeping).

These inconsistent triggering circumstances for various fellow-sufferers incline me to do no further minor-rev upgrades to my system now that I have it working again (for the time being at least).

I doubt this was my problem. First, my 16" MBP has the RAM solder on by Apple. Second, Apple replaced my mother board and again with RAM soldered on I assume that means I got a whole different set of Apple provided RAM. This did not fix my problem in the slightest. Third, my problems mostly went away with the upgrade 10.15.6. The number and variety of machines on this thread indicates Apple clearly has a software quality issue and it amazes me that there are over 90 entries on this thread and no comment from Apple. I live 20 minutes from Apple HQ and I've offered to drive down and loan them my system and all hardware necessary to predictably reproduce the issue in seconds. ...... Crickets.

I should note that my machine is a 27" iMac (2019). Not sure how relatable my issue can be with an MBP. My issue has not been directly resolved either, so please do not take my previous comment as a possible solution. I hope this helps sort my part of the conversation.