iMac keeps crashing after Catalina upgrade

I am now running both Mojave and Big Sur on separate partitions on my iMac and I still have the problem on Big Sur but not on Mojave.

I don't have an iMac but a Mac Mini 2018 i7. And I used to be fine with a HDMI Samsung monitor. I attached an LG Ultrafine 5k monitor and kernel panics started. Resetting SMC, downgrading to Mojave and all sorts of trials did not help. My wife's macbook pro had been fine with the monitor - no kernel panics in the three months we have had the monitor.

I tried "Macs Fan Control" software and run the fans at max. Kinda noisy, but it has so far been one week without a kernel panic. I think the cpu was overheating when attempting to drive the monitor.

Perhaps try this?

just wanted to add my voice to this, same thing is happening with me. The only external monitor I have connected is an old thunderbolt apple monitor. I haven't experienced the crashing during any specific activity, it only seems to be happening when the computer goes to sleep (I basically don't realize it has crashed until trying to wake it up). I do get the "your computer restarted because of a problem" error and submit the crash logs accordingly.

until it's solved I guess I'll be relying on the 10+ year old caffeine app to keep it awake? fantastic.

I've found doing a safe boot at least allows me to use my computer without the crashing, so I can debug things. (hold down shift key while restarting)

Makes me suspect it's one of the programs that loads on startup. I'm going to try turning off Moom, which resizes windows, given the original poster's mention of "Windows Manager".

Computer: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15 inch, Late 2013), 2.6 i7, 16gb ram, graphics: NVIDIA GeoForce GT 750 M & Intel Iris Pro.

macOS Catalina
Version 10.15

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)
Processor 3.7 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
Memory 40 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
Graphics Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

(No external monitor)

I was able to reduce crashes by viewing the Console > Crash Reports and noticed PenTabletDriver and WacomTabletDriver, were crashing every couple of minutes. I never used this device (someone else had set it up) so I found out how to remove it and it's helped, but general lockups and crashing still occur.

Just wanted to put that out there to view [Command + Space] > "Console" > [Return] > (click) "Crash Reports" and view what's in there. May give you some insight into what's transpiring.

A lot of my Adobe Creative Suite apps have been crashing, like Adobe Lightroom CC and Adobe Premiere Rush (includng AdobeIPCBroker, Adobe CEF Helper) and they're fully locking up the machine with,

EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) -> KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at ____

So I will just have to wait for Adobe to fix those apps before I can have a productive day I guess...

Just came across an article at MacPaw with a variety of suggestions for those of us having Catalina issues: https://macpaw.com/how-to/fix-macos-catalina-problems

Here’s one that seems particularly interesting (I know it mentions freezing on reboot, but perhaps the kext issue relates to why many of us can get Catalina to work only on Safe Boot?)

• Solution: Move Library Extensions

As a band-aid solution, you can relocate your /Library/Extensions kexts to a backup folder. As confirmed by many users, this fixes macOS Catalina stuck on reboot problem. 

To perform this, you will need Terminal app:

Click Launchpad > Terminal

Now paste in the following command:

mkdir ~/Extensions-Backup && sudo mv /Library/Extensions/* ~/Extensions-Backup/

This command relocates your Library Extensions to the username/Extensions Backup folder. Later you can put the Extensions back where they belong at: /Library/Extensions.

It appears there is one process called "photoanalysisd" process that caused CPU went to roof. In my case, it was near 200% and it appears Catalina has a problem of managing such process. That is one of Apple programs. The Apple support asked me to create a separate new user account and log back in with that new user account to see if iMac would still crash. I did and Catalina holds and iMac didn't crash randomly anymore.

I'm going to try to empty my Picture folder and log back in with my original ID and see if that helps.

Anyway, Catalina sucks! It appears that there was a big gap in the testing as I didn't experience this kind before. I highly suggest you to enter your feedback at apple.com/feedback. I was told that Apple take the customer entered feedback "seriously". More people report that might get the fix prioritized and fixed early.

The lesson learned from this is that I will never jump on any of new MacOS again until it's true stable going forward.

Ditto that... 2018 MacBook Pro Core i9, 32GB of RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 20, 1TB SSD, and after two more crashes, I could finally post this found in Crash Reports:

"Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGKILL)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service

Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: com.apple.WindowServer returned not alive with context:

unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread

40 seconds since last successful checkin, 5263 total successsful checkins since wake (0 induced crashes)

Application Specific Information:

StartTime:2019-10-11 00:14:23

GPU:IG&AMD

MetalDevice for accelerator(0x3227): 0x7f90ad50a568 (MTLDevice: 0x7f90b00a8000)

MetalDevice for accelerator(0x4703): 0x7f90ad420bc8 (MTLDevice: 0x7f90b0010000)

IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/PEG0@1/IOPP/EGP0@0/IOPP/EGP1@0/IOPP/GFX0@0/ATY,Xingu@1/AMDFramebufferVega10"

The crash is the process name WindowServer pointing a t the video card. Mac crashes when I am away from it 10-20 minutes or so. If I use the Mac constantly, then there is no problem.

Déjà vu! I had a 2010 MacBook Pro once that got totaled because of dual video card issues, especially bad GPU cooling hardware. When is this going to be fixed for good, I have no clue.

Some good news here.

i had been getting the “could not mount”, “disenter” error on my backup, too, and thought it was lost. Would not mount, couldn’t run disk first aid. I had hoped to use the backup to restore to Mojave.

What I did that ultimately worked was boot into recovery with the original OS that my computer came with (opt-shift-CMD-R) and install High Sierra on an external drive. Then I booted from that, and updated that to Mojave.

While booted with that drive, i used Terminal to list the drives. My backup volume was listed, but it was decrypting, and was 22% completed. I never saw any progress on that.

I looked online and found that others had that happen when the disk was stuck on a fsck process. I checked for fsck processes, and it turned out there was one running on my backup drive that never seemed to complete. (That’s because with my machine crashing constantly, it could never finish, and it refused to mount until fsck was done.)

I think I’d started to decrypt the drive at some point when I was trying to use it as a restore source. Having the drive in mid-decrypt might explain why I wasn’t able to get it to show in Recovery.

I forced the fsck to quit, a few times (it kept resuming) but finally it stopped, and I got a finder message asking me if I wanted to use my Backup as a time machine drive.

i opened Disk Utility and ran that overnight, and checked this morning. Green check mark, drive is mounted, and terminal now shows 28% decrypted.

I’m going to let that complete, then boot into Recovery again (with my Mojave install as my boot disk I use get Mojave recovery instead of Catalina) and then try to restore to my Oct 7 backup.

I’ve already made a USB drive that contains any documents I’ve modified since then, which I can put back once the process is complete.

Same here with the Supplemental Update. I was hoping it would increase stability, but it's actually made it more unstable. It crashing DURING the update and I thought the iMac was about to be bricked. It was able to recover, but lockups and reboots still occur. No where near production ready.

System Version: macOS 10.15 (19A602)

Kernel Version: Darwin 19.0.0

Model Identifier: iMac19,1

Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Core i5

Well, app developers fixed my macOS Catalina. I had a feeling it was Xquartz messing with the video card's GPU. The new OS Catalina has far better securities in place than any other OS to date. So, out with obsoletes, bin folder, files and may others from even 2016, including Xquartz.plist, and now my computer is behaving awesome.

What I did: Share Mac Analytics, Share with App Developers, Share Share iCloud Analytics and let it Sleep but, Awake for Nework. It took less than a week to see today a linked to folder icon only desktop named "relocated Items". When I followed it, it got me to this:

A brief explanation of files that were incompatible macOS security settings - I am, just simply paraphrasing the explanation in file "What Are Relocated Items?.pdf" because is copyrighted. And, that was it... 'been happy camper since yesterday.

Now I've learned new stuff... Take care.

My 6 month old Mac book Pro is now crashing several time per day. Calling apple care is like calling some one randomly to look fixes on the internet while you wait. Terrible update; Catalina is obviously not ready.

Yes! Catalina is NOT ready. I never update the first time Apple release an update. They can’t seem to listen to us? As a stumbling example of Software issues, look at the IOS today, another update was released for IPhone and IPads. That’s about 6 already. Seems those who knew how to write systems software have retired?

Usually I have not been auto updating; but there have been so many updates recently and I just clicked auto update. I am so tired of Apple prematurely sending theses updates out. I lost a lot of work today. I am just a few rounds from tapping out. This can't continue like this. Seriously.

I installed today's update and did a test to see if it fixed the problem of the Mac crashing based on the screen saver or sleep settings inducted kernel panics. It does not. I am back to disabling the screen saver and sleep settings to keep the Mac functional.