Catalina 10.15.6 keeps crashing

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.

Follow up on my experience since the crash first occurred:

• After crashing every 10 minutes I tried all kinds of recoveries without success. Unfortunately I didn't have an external time machine to save my data
• Finally I decided to do a fresh reinstall of MacOS which itself ran into this crashing issue multiple times
• After multiple attempts of installing MacOS from various safe modes and resets the installation went through
• Now I'm running on MacOS 10.15.6, fresh install and I'm crash free
• I've gone back to using all my previous apps including docker (vm software) without problems for at least a month now.

This will probably not help much, but at least there's some hope that the hardware isn't broken.

Maybe if you do a fresh reinstall it'll work for you, but know that I lost all my data in the process.

Oh yeah and Apple phone support, if anything, only made things worse in this case (I probably could've saved my data if this was done right).

My crashes stopped after uploading the newest version of FileStream. Not sure if this app is running on your computer, but I would check any background apps to make sure the latest versions are running.

Are you running G00gle FileStream?

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

Apple has release a supplemental update this morning. Hopefully everything is fine after this. I’ve already done my update and turned on sleep function to see if it crashes.

4 days in with no attached external drives and not a single crash.

I have switched to a new NAS and not had an issue since.

install 10.15.7. And your problems are over.

I did. Never crashed afterwards.

Another data point and possible work around.... When running Vmware Fusion.... check your memory allocations your VM's running under fusion.

On the MacMini with 16GB I run Fusion on, I had Win10 allocated 7GB of memory (7168).... Mojave never blinked with this allocation.

On a hunch with Catalina, I lowered the Win10 allocation to 4GB (4096). The system stayed stable. I saw the Fusion process (Vmware-vmx) slowly grab it's memory allocation up to 4GB then it stopped. I presume at that point, Win10 memory management processes on the VM kicked in.

Seems like there is some kind of tipping point in Catalina on memory usage versus physical memory.... Will watch how Fusion runs with the lower Win10 memory allocation for a while... As we are only running Quickbooks, we don't need high performance... stability is more important...

[SOLUTION?]

My MacBook Air had recurring kernel panics / hard reboots about once a day, mostly over night when it was on idle.

I now got entirely rid of the problem, however I am not sure which of these four steps did the trick:

• deactivated Spotlight for the startup volume*
• removed photoanalysisd**
• removed Homebrew, Monolingual and smcfancontrol
• installed Command Line Tools beta 3 for Xcode (which was flagged as a regular update in Software Update)

My MacBook runs perfectly stable for seven days now.

PS: The computer does not have, and never had, VMWare or anything similar installed.

------------

*) I deactivated Spotlight because it wrote hundreds of warning messages to the system.log, sometimes even half a dozen of these within one second:

Jul 28 15:48:40 [Mac's name] com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.03000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000[24219]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[118]

**) I removed photoanalysisd, as it used a concerning amount of CPU time, by executing this command in the Terminal:

sudo launchctl remove com.apple.photoanalysisd

• removed Homebrew, Monolingual and smcfancontrol

PS: I forgot to mention that I also removed “CleanMyDrive 2”, a menu bar app which always runs in background and deletes hidden Finder files (.DS_Store, .Spotlight-V100, .fseventsd etc.) from external disks.

Apple had no plans to release a major update for Catalina in the form of macOS 10.15.7.

The folks @ Cupertino are actually working on a supplemental update for macOS 10.15.6 containing a fix for the App Sandbox which caused virtualization software to crash with memory leaks and "watchdog timeout" kernel panics.

frtzn wrote:

Here we go again: My MacBook Air just had another kernel panic. So apparently, the 2.82 GB „supplemental update“ did not solve the issue. What a disappointment.

What this says is that your kernel panics are unrelated to the memory leak fixed with the update. It means you could have a hardware issue or you could have a third party kernel extension that is misbehaving. My first suggestion would be to take your machine for a hardware diagnostic. Or you might download and install Etrecheck to run a system check for problems that might cause a kernel panic. I apologize if you have already done this.

lkrupp wrote:

What this says is that your kernel panics are unrelated to the memory leak fixed with the update.

Exactly. As noted earlier, people in this thread and in other forums complain about three issues:

• kernel panics due to a memory leak (fixed with this week's supplemental update)
• kernel panics without memory issues, often when the machine is on idle (problem introduced with 10.15.6)
• kernel panics related to system sleep (an older Catalina issue, still not fixed)

I was hoping that a 2.8 GB update would fix the other issues as well. Yet, Apple hasn't even confirmed that there is another problem apart from the memory leak.

It means you could have a hardware issue …

… which is a possibility, even on a three-week old computer. However, the very same problem suddenly appeared for dozens of users when they updated from 10.15.5 to 10.15.6, indicating that it's an OS issue.

My first suggestion would be to take your machine for a hardware diagnostic. Or you might download and install Etrecheck to run a system check for problems that might cause a kernel panic. I apologize if you have already done this.

I already did both (however the suggestion is appreciated). No problems were found either during the hardware test or the Etrecheck diagnostic, making a hardware issue even more unlikely.

The only option for me now is to take a day off from work, drive to town, bring the MacBook back to the shop where I purchased it, and let them replace it. First-world problems of course, but still annoying. ;)

TomHaukap : Since installing the supplemental update on 3 different machine (2 Mac-mini, 1 Imac27) when it first came out, I have not had any kernel panics or other issues. One machine is now running VMware Fusion with no issues. I have my Imac27 grinding out a TM backup to one of the Mac-Mini's over the network. It has been running successfully for hours now. The other machine, basically pure vanilla, is not having any problems connecting via our network with data stored on the other 2 machines.... This is all a huge difference since prior to 10.15.6 supplemental....

In looking at the posts, I did not see a troubleshooting report on your system so pardon me if you have already done this previously... when I first upgraded to 10.15.5, then upgraded to 10.15.6, I did not even get to the situation where I was seeing crashes due to memory leaks, etc. My systems were totally unstable. What I discovered was that when I upgraded, even though I had obsoleted all 32 bit apps from my workflow, they were still loaded on the systems, and their associated crud (launch agents, daemons, etc) were trying to start up. After meticulously removing all vestiges of the 32bit apps, the system was able to achieve "stability" to the point I could see the kernel panics and memory leak issues that were in the system. if you have already cleaned out all of the 32bit apps and their detritus, then you can ignore this comment. If you have not... give that a try before you give up on 10.15.6...

DhairyaSenjaliya wrote:

Hello Have you try to disable Thunderbolt related drivers ?

In my case I have the same problem it automatically shutdown randomly So I removed all thunderbolt drive and it works well now

Thank you for this suggestion. Just to be more clear about this: Do you use any (USB or Thunderbolt) hardware on your USB-C ports other than the charging cable? If you do: Did your Mac crash even when nothing was plugged in?