Panic - Watchdog Timeout: no checkins from watchdogd in 185 seconds

Same issue on both of my Macbook Pro 16"s.... Start happening about a week ago, so probably in-line with a recent update.

Macbook crashes every time it goes to sleep. Using caffeinate, or a wrapper around it (such as Keeping You Awake), keeps the issue at bay as it stops sleeping. I use an external monitor which might relate.

Please test your updates at Apple before sending them out to everyone. I shouldn't have to hard reboot every time a $2000 laptop goes to sleep.

I had this happen today twice on two different machines connected to the same network: Macbook Pro (15", 2017) WiFi only and Mac Pro (2019) wire only. Both are running 10.15.6. Macbook Pro came back from sleep (I don't remember when I last rebooted it), but MacPro was only running for maybe 30 minutes and never went to sleep. I both situations I was using a Chrome browser. Macbook pro was the first "victim" and I though that Chrome ran out of the swap space (I though my SSD was tight). However after crash I checked and I still have about 48GB of disk left. Note that in both cases the system just froze for a minute or two before it crashed. I have "OnHub Wireless Router from Google and TP-LINK, Color Blue" with Google WiFi points. Macbook Pro had no external devices attached. Mac Pro had few disks (USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2).

Same issue as posted by everyone here.

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f9e3c7ad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds

2013 Mac Pro running Catalina 10.15.6 with two Apple Thunderbolt displays, TimeMachine to external SSD, Avira Security software. Bluetooth keyboard, Anker wireless mouse with USB dongle.

Crashes happen at least daily, sometimes more often, no clear pattern to circumstances.

Have just installed the recommended 10.15.4 COMBO - will see if it makes any difference.

As a follow up, this was fixed for me with the August 12 10.15.6 supplemental update, as mentioned here https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/12/apple-releases-macos-10-16-5-supplemental-update/. Note that this update is different from just '10.15.6'... it seems Apple doesn't like to increment minor numbers and is still calling this 10.15.6 supplement update.

This has happened on my Mac Pro ever since I received it in May and nothing seems to fix it. It will go a week (sometimes 2) and then it starts shutting down or rebooting every time I'm not using it for 2 or 3 days and then goes back to normal. Sometimes it will boot to the login screen and only sit there for a moment before restarting or rebooting. Sometimes after shutting down the system is dead as a doornail for 10 minutes before it will restart. Just so you know, I spent about two months working with Apple enterprise (June and July while running Catalina, now I'm on Big Sur) trying to get this resolved and sent them many many diagnostics. We decided it was probably a hardware issue . I took my Mac Pro to an Apple repair shop and left it there for the month of August. They said they couldn't reproduce it. Funny, as soon as I got it back it rebooted before I managed to even log in. Now we've talked Apple into replacing the graphics MPX module (W5700X) since the log files have a GPURestart error a dozen times before every shutdown. My point is that I'm thinking this watchdog shutdown isn't caused by just one thing. I think there are various possible things that cause it. Clearly most people having this issue have different hardware than I do and very few have the W5700X MPX module, so that is not the common thread. I do run my LG 5k monitor off from USB-C. However I swapped it out for my wife's LG 4k HDMI monitor and it still had the shutdown/reboot issue. I've done clean installs of Catalina and Big Sur and no other software with no luck. I'm out of ideas.

On my Mac Pro, it was being caused by the McAfee kext mandated by my employer. Started in safe mode, rock solid for three weeks. Started with McAfee, crash within a few hours. Has been up continuously since I was allowed to get rid of McAFee going on three weeks now with pretty close to 100% CPU utilization during that time. Just FYI.

"..,Has been up continuously since I was allowed to get rid of McAFee ..."

It is good your employer saw sense in the end. Third party security apps always cause problems on Macs which have three level security built in.

The place for A/V in an enterprise is in the enterprise mail servers and firewalls to protect the Windows kit.

I spent a long time with Apple support looking at dumps from the panics on my machine - they found nothing useful.

However, their advice worked. I installed a completely new system on an external drive, and recreated the users - not copying them from previous backups. I've only copied over applications as I've needed them specifically.

I've now not had any panics for over two months. They were occurring twice a day. So, I don't know what third party was causing the problem, but that was what was the ætiology.

instanton wrote:

On my Mac Pro, it was being caused by the McAfee kext mandated by my employer. Started in safe mode, rock solid for three weeks. Started with McAfee, crash within a few hours. Has been up continuously since I was allowed to get rid of McAFee going on three weeks now with pretty close to 100% CPU utilization during that time. Just FYI.

If you have McAfee 10.6.6, you can put it into kext-less mode, which has helped at my employer (same mandate for company Macs)

https://docs.mcafee.com/bundle/endpoint-security-10.6.0-installation-guide-macOS/page/GUID-74D9510B-A542-4811-AF36-78EA5949128A.html

This is a frustrating issue. I have a late 2013 27" iMac with one external monitor and 3 external drives, and this happens almost daily when I attempt a shutdown. I regularly run CleanMyMac and Disc Utility to make sure everything is clean and in proper order. Zero response from Apple when submitting this problem. I've run all the updates and am current and this still continues. Frustrating it is not being worked on.

I had lots of these kernel panic error in my iMac 21.5 inch 2017 running Catalina 10.15.7. So. So, I started a very long process: disconnect every peripheral; low level format of the internal disk; fresh OS (+update) and relevant apps installation from network; restore of only documents and data form TimeMachine backup; peripherals connected; all, with frequent shutdowns to check for the problem arising again. It didn´t show up.

Then, I got an error and decided to format the TimeMachine disk just in case. After a fresh full backup, the error showed up again; this time I noticed that the TimeMachine disk was "growling" a lot after the shutdown command and I got the restart and the kernel panic error.

My easy fix: I just eject the TimeMachine disk before shutdown, and everything goes well. I also have an external monitor that doen´t seem to matter to my process.

Hope it helps someone until Apple finds a way out.

I had a warning from ESET AntiVirus instalation some time ago that I had ClamXav installed, and I did not know about such program and could not find it. But I was inspired by peter_watt and did one more special search. I found a folder inside /usr/local/ named ClamXav and deleted it. Someone knows anything about a relation between ClamXav and kernel panics?

I can confirm that, in my case, the culprit looks like ClamXav. I already did half a dozen shutdowns and restarts in conditions I knew would trigger a kernel panic, and I'm glad to say that it's gone. Hope it helps someone.

If I were you I would create a new discussion and paste in a copy of this post.

This thread will not be visited by experienced volunteers now. It is stale.

I suspect the encrypted/Filesafe (?) formatting is working against you. Plain APFS would be the norm but I don't know why it will not let you reformat it.

After hours in the phone with Apple and a drop off at the Apple store, they concluded it was either a faulty logic board or solid state drive. Both were replaced and the problem stopped. I was glad to have a backup in Time Machine from just before the computer failed.