Catalina 10.15.6 keeps crashing

Ok what worked for me to fix it is by reinstalling the operating system. I also deleted parallels desktop because i read some things about vm software messing up this update, but basically i just followed this link https://support.apple.com/kb/HT204904

With these being the more direct instructions

1 Restart your Mac and immediately press and hold these keys: option, Command (⌘) and R. 

2 Release the keys when you see an Apple logo, spinning globe, or other startup screen.

3 You might be prompted to enter a password, such as a firmware password or the password of a user who is an administrator of this Mac. Enter the requested

4. Startup is complete when you see the utilities window

Just backup your files first and create a time machine backup if you can. I didn’t lose anything however. Also make sure you have a stable internet connection throughout.

Updated to 10.15.6 Supplemental and my kernel panics have stopped. I have some other somewhat unusual behavior such as a lot of fan activity and the fact that my iMac monitor will not go into “off” mode no matter what the power saving settings are. Other than that the supplemental has handled the major issue and I am hoping that Big Sur will take care of the other odd behaviors. I am running both VMWare Fusion and Parallels 16.

frtzn wrote:

Following a hint from another thread, it becomes more and more likely that either Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Cloud is the software responsible for the crashes.

On 20 August, I wiped my HD and did a clean install of Catalina 10.15.6 on my MacBook Air.

Every few days, I installed a couple more applications: VLC, Google Chrome, Mullvad VPN, Thunderbird, Little Snitch, Micro Snitch, BBEdit, Transmission, Google Earth, BlueHarvest, Swinsian, Moom, Zoom, Fujifilm X Webcam.

For nine days, I had no kernel panic.

On August 29, I installed Adobe Creative Cloud. My Mac immediately started to behave oddly, e.g. the screen froze for about a minute each time I woke the computer up from sleep. Four days later, I had another kernel panic.

I uninstalled Adobe Creative Cloud, and the freeze-on-wakeup issues are gone again. I will use the Mac like this for the next days, checking if it crashes again. At the moment however, it seems to me that Adobe is the cause for those kernel panics.

In my case, this looks to be related to Virtual box (6.1.12)

I tried going back to previous versions of Virtual box (6.1.8), which had no issues previously, but crashes now.

After the upgrade to 10.15.6, Virtual box seems to be one reason MacOS freezes and crashes.

Without Virtual box, system seems to be running without any issues, I have send a few auto generated crash reports to Apple

I have had the exact same problem and have been tracking it down for several days (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251610118)

In my case I had not purged my disk of old 32bit applications, the launch agents and daemons, and other flotsam and jetsam... After meticulously removing them, I have not had a system crash now in 3 days... Don't know if you installed Catalina over a pre-existing High Sierra or Mojave system... but if you did and did not purge the disk of 32bit stuff... you may want to take a look at it...

Here is what I did:

1. Restore 10.15.5 from a Time Machine backup
2. Restored selected, personal files from a clone I just did (so I do not miss all the work I did since 7/19/2020, which is when I originally update to 10.15.6)

Now:

1. Excessive fan phenomenon no longer happening (it was happening even after NVRAM/SMC reset)
2. My machine is not crashing anymore
3. I can now run disk intensive operations while Time Machine is running, and still no overheating

So, I'll be sticking to 10.15.5 until Apple releases an update and explicitly acknowledges this problem and its resolution in said update.

I have 2 mac minis, 2012 and 2014, applied update to both and both started crashing multi-daily with black screens and required hard reboots.

Yesterday, I restored the 10.15.6 MacOS on the 2014 (option+cmd+R on reboot and select install 'new OS' and erase existing partition) and then restored apps and user data via time machine during OS setup process - so far rock solid.

Note - I have VMware Fusion installed on 2014 mac mini initially, not any longer; 2012 mac mini did not have Fusion/VirtualBox installed

Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report

IMPORTANT:

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck in the Etrecheck's Privacy preference pane so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Also click and read the About info to further permit full disk access.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what might be causing the problem.

Same here, back to 10.15.5, stable again since.

And no, it's not related to VMWare for me: It crashed with or without running any virtual machine.

It's the first time I need to revert an update. It's a little bit a shame. I always trusted Apple and it worked so great over the last decade.

So, after several attempts of formatting the disc, reinstalling the os, and just retrying over and over, I finally managed to get the OS to complete installation without the system crashing. It's been running pretty well for about 1 day before I got the crash again. I don't have any vmware or virtualbox, but docker is installed which might be causing similar issues (it uses virtualbox drivers in the default configuration). However, I've been running 20 different services in parallel for a few hours and didn't have any issues. The crash happened when highlighting an element in the somwhere UI.

Currently I'm running the system with docker disabled. Let's see if the issue persists. According to an article I read that the virtualbox/vmware community thinks that this a kernel memory leak (https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox-tools-impacted-by-macos-catalina-memory-leaks).

After I downgraded to 10.15.5, my iMac hasn't crashed overnight.

Something is not right in 10.15.6. I am not sure exactly what caused this. The photoanalysisd has been running for a while since I have a large photo library. I also didn't install the command line tools beta 3. I also see many laundchd message in system.log even in 10.15.5. So I guess all these are not the real root cause.

Right now, I am skipping 10.15.6 and hope Apple's next update will solve this problem.

I run backup (Carbon Copy Cloner) every night (Mac mini -> Mac mini Server).

And it crash every night.

If I run backup manually it goes ok but scheduled backup -> server crash.

I disable backup and no crash for two days.

I have Microsoft Office... however, I think the culprit is more likely to be my external disk drives - 5 in a caddy. When they were disconnected my iMac did not crash at all. Initially I thought it was a thunderbolt connection issue, and moving to a USB connection seemed to make the crashes less frequent, but they still happened. The exception was for the 24 hours or so that I left one disk connected and copied the data to a NAS - no crash while the disk was active.

Are you running G00gle FileStream?

If so, quit it for a while and see if your errors go away…