Catalina: after 10.15.6 update, the system became unstable, a lot of kernel panics. The system was stable before the update

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Level 1

8 points

Catalina: after 10.15.6 update, the system became unstable, a lot of kernel panics. The system was stable before the update

After installing update 10.15.6 few days ago, since after the first reboot, the system became incredibly unstable. This machine (iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) contains only several VirtualBox machines running from years without problems. The problem seems to directly related to the 10.15.6 update, because the only effect post update is that the machine became unusable.

Following the forums, I have detached any external device like mouse, hard disks, but the problem persists. Sometimes the system live for minutes, some times for one/two hours. Any version of VirtualBox tested, from 5.x to 6.1.12, the system crash without reason. SSD disk is ok, RAM is ok, NVRAM cleared, Onyx passed. It would seem that the system allocates memory until exhaustion and gets stuck in kernel panic after the physical memory has been exceeded. The machine has 32GB and the VMs in total use 28GB, and until the update they had always worked very well.

Sample of kernel panic (from the hundreds that have happened in the last few days) ... :

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f959dfad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 130 seconds

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (10014 seconds ago): 1001, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (9984 seconds ago): 980, last successful checkin: 130 seconds ago

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f8f7dfad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 138 seconds

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (7930 seconds ago): 792, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (7900 seconds ago): 776, last successful checkin: 138 seconds ago

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f86bdfa8d): watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd in 98 seconds (1151 total checkins since monitoring last enabled)

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff7f94efaaae): watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd in 306 seconds (129 totalcheckins since monitoring last enabled), shutdown in progress

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff7f841dfad5): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds

service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (17840 seconds ago): 1784, last successful checkin: 0 seconds ago

service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (17810 seconds ago): 1737, last successful checkin: 120 seconds ago

panic(cpu 3 caller 0xffffff801d42ee2f): "invalid commandSleep while not holding the gate"@/AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/iokit/Kernel/IOCommandGate.cpp:323

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff800322ee2f): "invalid commandSleep while not holding the gate"@/AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/iokit/Kernel/IOCommandGate.cpp:323

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 20, 2020 2:09 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

mnuruddin

Level 1

11 points

Aug 16, 2020 7:47 PM in response to fabiofacal

Apple just released the supplemental update for macOS Catalina 10.15.6 on Aug 12th, 2020. This updates includes :

Fixes a stability issue that could occur when running virtualization apps
Resolves an issue where an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) may appear washed out after waking from sleep

I guess bullet no 1 refer to this issue.

Please refer to link for more information

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2049?locale=en_US

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Answer 2

fabiofacal Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 23, 2020 12:51 AM in response to schiegl

After several night and days of debugging, I can confirm that the new update 10.15.6 used in conjunction with VirtualBox it causes countless kernel panics. Although the use of the physical RAM of the virtual machines is much lower than the total RAM, the system gradually saturates all the available RAM and upon reaching the threshold of the physical RAM (in my case 32GB) the system crashes inexorably. It does not depend on sleep as I have disabled everything, including screen savers or any type of energy saving. The machine only contains OSx and the virtual machines that had worked without problems for several years in a row.

In the end, the solution was to buy a new server (not Apple), move the virtual machines to it, and everything went back into place.

This situation is unfortunately making me reconsider my dedication to Apple: it is truly incredible that an update makes it impossible to use the system, never seen so many kernel panics in a row.

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Answer 3

fabiofacal Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 21, 2020 2:19 AM in response to fabiofacal

Update:

reinstalled VirtualBox 6.1.12, with all VM loaded. After deleting any Mac Os bluetooth associations, old and new, and recreating associations for standard apple keyboard and mouse, the system still not crashed (from 8 hours at this time). The other setting was unlink the machine from iCloud. The system now contains itself and five running VMs. The total memory dedicated to running VMs is 22,1 GB of real memory (the system has 32GB installed)

Hypothesis:

1. seems to be a direct correlation between bluetooth unlinked peripheral and kernel panics. Deleting any unlinked peripherals given a stability at system, until now.
2. the memory use grow automatically and when the physical memory was completely used, any request to system generate a kernel panic.

Considerations:

1. the total memory consumption is many more than before the 10.15.6 update
2. verified that it's possible to get kernel panic simply closing and restarting a VM that require 6GB of memory:

memory status after closing the 6Gb active VM

PhysMem: 27G used (26G wired), 5326M unused.

The system unable to restart the VM, going immediately in kernel panic.

Seems that the system uses extra memory and not able to use swap file normally.

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Answer 4

schiegl

Level 1

4 points

Jul 22, 2020 2:58 AM in response to fabiofacal

me, too. 2 Machines

iMac - with possible lots of cruft and Virtual Box 5.2.34, SSD, 16GB RAM, Bluetooth Keyboard/Trackpad (since disabling VirtualBox on this machine, no crashes for 2 days)
Mac mini - fresh installation, clean machine, only with Virtual Box 6.1.12, SSD, 16 GB RAM, lots of free RAM, no Bluetooth.

Both Machines have crashed multiple times - mostly after transitioning in/out of Sleep Mode (I suspect). Never happened before 10.15.6.

Will monitor the System RAM, if it's really filling up...

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Answer 5

fabiofacal Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 7, 2020 12:29 AM in response to levimluke

The problem persists with any VirtualBox version. VirtualBox works perfectly with the same VMs on others hosts platforms (Linux, Windows). The problem is present only with Catalina 10.15.6. As you can see, simply transferring the VMs to another host solve the problem. Actually I have two iMac 27" unused because the kernel panics makes running VMs not possible :-(

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Answer 6

ml2517

Level 1

15 points

Aug 3, 2020 8:21 AM in response to fabiofacal

I'm getting this same behavior with VMWare Fusion Pro 11.5.5 (the latest version) on a 2019 27" iMac with 64GB of RAM - I run three virtual machines with 8GB allotted for each and after a few days my OS eventually crashes or becomes so unstable you cannot even shutdown/restart the iMac properly. Prior to this I'd had no issues at all since I'd bought this machine in 2019.

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