Catalina 10.15.6 keeps crashing

I do not have VMware installed, but do have Virtual Box.

Having a VM running on one of my laptops was accelerating the problem, but not causing it. Even laptops that updated to 10.15.6 that have no VM software running (nor installed) also had this issue (keychain seems to crash, asking you to login to everything again), but login won't work till you reboot.

Tried everything on this forum - only thing that worked was restoring 10.15.5.

It appears that virtual imaging software might cause a kernel extension conflict with macOS 10.15.6. This specific problem affects users who installed the latest versions of VirtualBox and VMware Fusion on their computers.

Me2. Older iMac ran great until I upgraded. Waiting impatiently for a fix. FWIW, I do have Virtualbox installed (although Windowserver starts eating the CPU at boot, without running any user programs). I had to use this Windows machine to even post this reply. Come on, Apple.

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

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).

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...

Not that it matters, but I don't think it is... There are too many Catalina kernel panics and hard crashes being reported with multiple apps. Unless the update to Catalina exposed latent programming errors in a lot of apps, which is not the simplest answer by a long shot, the bug is probably in a module in Catalina that was changed... The fact that the bug is visible in Fusion and Virtualbox and in separate long duration processes is a clue for Apple engineers to track down. if being posted on the VMware communities and being pursued by VMware engineers helps light a fire with Apple engineers, I'm all in with that no matter whose bug it is.... it needs to be fixed!

I agree with Old Toad. I have this OS installed in two fairly new iMacs and have had no problems. I regularly do maintenance and am careful not to install junk apps, which are most often the cause of many problems. But, unless and until we know what is installed, there can be no answers to address this issue. Moving on to someone who wants to help us help them . . . . . .

Quick followup...Using reduced memory allocation for Win10 VM in Vmware Fusion I successfully operated it for over 3 consecutive hours today with no crashes... Software operating on MacMini was Vmware Fusion 11.5.5 running Win10VM.. Win10 Ver 1903 Build 18362.959. Inside WinVM only Quickbooks Pro 2020 V30.0.4007.0.... No other SW running in Win10VM. Only other SW running in MacMini was Activity Monitor. Win10 VM accessed over local network from Imac27 via Windows Remote Desktop Ver 10.4.0.

In the MacMini... The VM was allowed to "take" 4GB on physical memory (which it did). Total Memory used in the MacMini(With 16GB Physical Memory) was between 8 and 8.5GB with App Memory occupying ~2-3GB and Wired memory ~5-6GB. Cache file occupied the additional 8GB of physical memory with swap use running between 50 and 150MB...

As I said in prior posts, we only run Vmware Fusion to do Windows to run Quickbooks, so it is a fairly light duty application. That being said, it was unusable when the Win10VM was allocated 7GB physical memory (which worked perfectly fine in Mojave). When Win10 VM knocked down to 4GB physical memory, system running stably in Catalina with no crashes...

Your milage may vary... but this is a work around that is working for me with Vmware Fusion....

Made a copy of my Virtualbox-based Windows VM and have tested it in Parallels, it has been running for a couple of days and no crashes unlike Virtualbox that crashed every few hours. Seems like this issue does not apply to all virtualization software so I will most likely move my stuff over to Parallels as it suits my needs. Unless Apple acknowledges the issue and pushes out an fix before the trial runs out,

I have recently purchased a mac mini 2018 and updated to 10.15.6 and the next day mac mini crashed. I am trying to revert back to the 10.15.5 without any success. I have still have a mac mini 2012 which had the same problem, however I had time machine backup so I reverted back to 10.15.5 and don’t have anymore crashed. If anybody know how I can downgrade to the previous version without using time machine please let me know.

Same here. It always happen during the early morning (3am - 9am) when the iMac is idle. Now I restore it from 10.15.5 and will see whether the problem is solved.

I have VirtualBox but didn't run it during the crash. So not sure whether that is the cause.

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.

• 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.

Same here. Since the downgrade, a week ago, no problem. TimeMachine is great.

When I update the machine I usually take the chance and remove some used software. So first I though that was the reason. Some incomplete removed driver or so. Nope, removed them on 10.15.5, all fine.

Keep my fingers crossed that Apple will find the reason soon. That can be hard sometimes.

Until then I wait for 10.15.7. And, sad to say, start with what I do with these windows machines all the time: Wait a while before installing an update.