Since installing Catalina yesterday, multiple crashes from userspace watchdog timeout

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

Previously I had been having the crashing problem as reported by you above. I am NOT using a 2nd monitor. I have a Late 2105 IMac 5K with 32 Gig memory and a 2 TB Fusion Drive. Memory was upgraded after purchasing the unit from an Apple Dealer but it had all worked fine until the I upgraded to Catalina. Apple support had me down grade from Catalina to Mohave. Downgrading worked but I saw that Catalina was now at 10.15.2 so I thought I would try the upgrade. I hoped Apple got the problem fixed.

Unfortunately, I have had 2 crashes this evening. I started experimenting with Side Car which is when the first crash happened. With Side Car not activated the crash still happens.

I am afraid the problem is not resolved yet for me.

Richard

Apple, WTF!!!

This crash is perfectly reproducable and happens always when the monitors goes to sleep... Anyway, there should be thousands of crash-reports with the same problem. Get the **** thing working!!

What drives me nuts is, software quality seems to be an unknown word for Apple, they take as much money they can from customers and provide lowest quality these days.

The whole Apple experience is really approaching the same situation why I switched from MS and PCs to Apple 10 years ago... Maybe time to change again.

Yeah, I can see that right now. And find it bottom drawer not to fix such extreme bugs for weeks and months although the support forum fills with messages. It's really an absolute cheek. And I wonder why it is not recognized in the beta versions.

The error is not reproducible and has nothing to do with Sleep Mode or Screensaver. Because my crashes always came in the middle of working. But I found out two things.

1. for me the virtual machine was in the cloud because it was automatically created in the folder "documents". And every time the cloud wanted to upload the file, nothing worked with Windows anymore. I don't know if it has anything to do with the guard dog crash. I took the virtual machine out of the cloud and Parallels and Windows are running stable again.

2nd Since I have the Quicktime video in the continuous loop running, I have no watchdog crashes anymore. But it's completely nonsense for me.

LordLobby wrote:

Apple, ***!!!

This crash is perfectly reproducable and happens always when the monitors goes to sleep... Anyway, there should be thousands of crash-reports with the same problem. Get the **** thing working!!

You would think ... !

I was discussing with Apple the other day, and it seems strange they do not monitor these forums. It would strike me as a no brainer just to keep an eye out for those threads which go above a certain number of replies, as they would indicate a widespread problem, but no.

Anyway, yes, like yours, mine was always crashing when my monitor went to sleep.

I was also having a problem with my Cable Matters USB-c unpowered ethernet/USB hub, which wasn't recognised. So I tried to book a Genius Bar appointment, something which Apple has made very difficult now (all automated and unless you answer questions a certain way on the app or the website, you won't get an appointment). I couldn't, so I went to the store, where they said I couldn't have an appointment as they were full. So I threw all my toys out of the pram, and finally they got a technician out from round the back. It was either that or they were going to have get some men in white coats to come and take me away.

We tested a Caldigit TS3 (http://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus) as the solution to the ethernet hub problem (and because it might deliver enough power to charge my iPad etc). I was nervous of spending that much, because it only delivers 85W and the new MacBook can take up to 96W.

Anyway, nearly 24 hours later and this Caldigit a) seems to provide enough power for the MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad connected simultaneously, and b) I don't want to tempt fate here, but since I bought it yesterday, and plugged the monitor into the caldigit, rather than directly into the Mac, I have not had another sleep crash.

It may also relate to the fact that I have changed the setting System Preferences > Energy Saving > Power Adapter > 'Turn display off after' to 'Never' (I wonder if this is an error when the MBP tells an external monitor to sleep and gets some sort of unexpected response, but I don't even know if that setting applies to external monitors). I have switched back to Turn display off after one minute and see if it crashes again.

Genius Bar: You seem to be brave... I would never have the idea to really try it and expect a solution. Anyway, your "driven nuts by Hipster stuff" report seems to support my bias ;-)

My monitors are connected to an iMacPro through an usb-c to HDMI converter, and I don't have any further unpowered usb-c stuff attached. Further, I expect the iMac to have enough power to drive things.

Before updating to Catalina I never encountered the now seen crash.

LordLobby wrote:

My monitors are connected to an iMacPro through an usb-c to HDMI converter, and I don't have any further unpowered usb-c stuff attached. Further, I expect the iMac to have enough power to drive things.

After setting the energy saving back to 'turn display off after 1 minute', it crashed again! So clearly Caldigit did not stop that issue.

Solution for me is to set 'turn display off' to 'never'.

And yes, I expected the MacBook Pro to have enough power to drive an ethernet adaptor. But maybe the issue is something other than power.

Unfortunately, Catalina 10.15.2 did not work for me. I still get the crashing and the frequency has picked up to about 8 crashes per day.

My computer is a late 2015 IMac with 32 Gig memory and 2 TB Fusion Drive.

I took the computer into the Apple Store and they had replaced the drive and the Wireless card, but none of that helped. Finally they downgraded to Mojavi and it worked until I got notification that 10.15.2 was available and there were a number of reports that this version fixed the problem.

The problem is not fixed.

I am NOT using an eternal monitor on my system configuration.

I have been having the crashing problem too. I am in safe mode now and for 1 day and 15 the system has not crashed. There are two applications that I need to use on my iMac - both use Java as the underlying language. I also have a 2019 MacBook Pro with the Developer's version on the Catalina OS. I have never had the problem on my 2019 MacBook Pro.

Apple support helped me downgrade the OS on why iMac 5K ( Late 2015, 32 Gig Fusion Drive) which Apple replaced the Hard Drive and the wireless card in an attempt to solve the problem before it went out of warrantee. The hardware replacements did not fix the problem. Safemode and Mojavi work fine with the Catalina OS.

Is it possible that Java is not updated to the right version in order for my Java based apps to work properly?

Are you using any Java based applications on your machine? Is it possible that these are causing the problem?

I have a call into Apple Support again so we can try and reinstall parts of Catalina. Now that we have seen that Safe Mode seems to work for a long period of time.

In my end Catalina crashes (one-two times a day) fixed with 10.15.3 beta (iMac 2019 with two 4k display under thunderbolt) 3 days without crashes....

For download the 10.15.3 just enroll the developer program and that's it.

For some reason I will get the crash when my computer goes to sleep. Only once while using it. I used to think it was related to Google Drive Updating in the background, but that might have been a different issue. Multiple monitors not a factor.

If it is a multi-thread race condition, as one user suggested, then could the number of CPUs be related to the frequency of the problem? I have 4 CPUs. If this had anything to do with the problem people with 12 to more would see it more frequently.

If I put my computer to sleep manually, it doesn't happen currently.

Been getting a similar issue. I seem to be able to stop the crash when I change the Screen Saver to something other than Catalina.

I have a Mac mini, 2018 and have two Apple LED Cinema Displays, connected via adapters from Thunderbolt to DisplayPort. I see that 10.15.3 has fixed it for someone, lets hope it does. I keep sending crash reports to Apple!

Hi guys - I did some tinkering and noticed that this may be a cabling issue.

Definitely make sure that you have the Thunderbolt cables connected properly especially if you have an eGPU. Just double checking the cables, etc. fixed it for me.

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f9704bad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds

service returned not alive with context : is_alive_func returned unhealthy : WindowServer initialization not complete (post IOKitWaitQuiet)

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (9850 seconds ago): 986, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (9790 seconds ago): 946, last successful checkin: 120 seconds ago

Backtrace (CPU 2), Frame : Return Address

0xffffff9154b6b820 : 0xffffff8015f3bb1b

0xffffff9154b6b870 : 0xffffff80160733e5

0xffffff9154b6b8b0 : 0xffffff8016064e5e

0xffffff9154b6b900 : 0xffffff8015ee2a40

0xffffff9154b6b920 : 0xffffff8015f3b207

0xffffff9154b6ba20 : 0xffffff8015f3b5eb

0xffffff9154b6ba70 : 0xffffff80166d2575

0xffffff9154b6bae0 : 0xffffff7f9704bad5

0xffffff9154b6baf0 : 0xffffff7f9704b7e6

0xffffff9154b6bb10 : 0xffffff8016666fcb

0xffffff9154b6bb60 : 0xffffff8016670083

0xffffff9154b6bca0 : 0xffffff8016022c22

0xffffff9154b6bdb0 : 0xffffff8015f41998

0xffffff9154b6be10 : 0xffffff8015f18625

0xffffff9154b6be70 : 0xffffff8015f2f0d5

0xffffff9154b6bf00 : 0xffffff801604b485

0xffffff9154b6bfa0 : 0xffffff8015ee3226

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.driver.watchdog(1.0)[EFAA17B9-A62C-30B7-9602-0BB5282EDDD6]@0xffffff7f9704a000->0xffffff7f97052fff

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: watchdogd

Mac OS version:

19C57

I have found if I leave Terminal open it prevents the crash as the OS asks you first if can close Terminal (or iTerm) before shutting itself off. I tried just turning off sleep mode, but it would still shut itself down every day or so. Once I kept Terminal running this was my bi-pass to crashing.