Kernel panic when opening About This Mac > Storage and waiting 20-30 secs (Catalina 10.15.6)

Question

Kernel panic when opening About This Mac > Storage and waiting 20-30 secs (Catalina 10.15.6)

Error from the "Send Report" dialog after restart

I'm consistently reproducing a kernel panic (followed by shutdown) every time I

open the “About This Mac” widget via the top left Apple icon,
switch to the Storage tab and
wait about 20-30 seconds.

Following this, the Mac Pro will not turn back on if I use the power button. I have to disconnect the power cord and wait 30 secs (thereby performing an SMC reset), reconnect, and then it will turn back on, giving me the initial scary "Your Mac restarted because of a problem" screen before booting up.

I’m using a new 2019 Mac Pro (purchased July 2020) and running the latest available version of Mac OS Catalina10.15.6 (19G73).

Processor: 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W

Memory: 384 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16 GB

Storage: 1TB SSD (factory installed by Apple) is my "system" drive

The only non-standard customization I’ve made to the Mac (only ~1 month old) is installing a Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card (Slient) with four 2GB Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 mounted - giving me an additional 8TB M2 drive (RAID0). I'm not trying to run Mac OS off it or anything - I just use it as a video/audio library.

Sonnet Card: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4x4-pcie-card/overview.html

Sabrent SSDs: https://www.sabrent.com/product/SB-ROCKET-2TB/2tb-rocket-nvme-pcie-m-2-2280-internal-ssd-high-performance-solid-state-drive/#description

I've been in contact with Apple Support, but the only unsatisfactory advice they gave me was to reinstall Mac OS. 😔 (I had literally only installed Mac OS for the first time after purchasing the machine when this started occurring)

Is anyone else out there running into this issue?

Mac Pro

Posted on Aug 11, 2020 9:00 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 12, 2020 8:56 AM in response to r1khil

Thanks for your engagement @r1khil.

Lots of apps installed (see extra list attached) - they were installed either using the latest installers available from the developer website (if not on Mac App Store), or via the Mac App Store. I didn't drag any apps over from another Mac or anything like that.

Apps installed

I am pretty meticulous about not having any apps running in the background unless absolutely necessary, and this issue is occurring after a boot up without having opened any apps.

The only software that's running in background on my Mac is

SoftRAID Monitor (linked to a purchased version of SoftRAID XT).
Duet
Coca

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Answer 2

Aug 12, 2020 8:32 AM in response to raffetazarius

P.S. The Mac Pro was set up with a clean OS install - not using Migration Assistant. All software was installed from latest available online installers or from Mac App Store.

So far I've tried:

Starting up in Recovery mode and running Disk Utility First Aid on both internal SSDs, the system SSD and the PCIe RAID SSD array - no errors are found and everything checks out OK.
Starting up in Diagnostic mode (holding D key during startup). No issues are found.

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Answer 3

Aug 15, 2020 1:05 PM in response to raffetazarius

Update: Apple Support reached out to me last week and have a senior advisor and engineering investigating the issue further. I provided full system logs for review.

The issue is reproducible without any external devices connected to the Mac Pro.

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Answer 4

Aug 15, 2020 6:41 PM in response to raffetazarius

There's a supplemental update for macOS 10.15.6 which fixes a known bug that caused stability issues with virtualization software. It also resolves an issue where an ‌iMac‌ (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) may appear washed out after waking from sleep.

The standalone installer weighs 2.82GB; it updates your system to build 19G2021.

.

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Answer 5

Aug 28, 2020 10:39 AM in response to dragontorc

Thanks for the response @dragontorc. I installed the 19G2021patch for Mac OS 10.15.6, but unfortunately my issue is still present.

The senior adviser from Apple Support followed up and said that they had confirmed there was an issue and my logs had provided useful info for engineering to work on a fix for release in a future Mac OS update.

For now, I'm avoiding opening the About This Mac > Storage window!

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Answer 6

Oct 2, 2020 3:04 PM in response to raffetazarius

So the latest 10.15.7 (19H2) OS update seems to have fixed this issue.

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Answer 7

r1khil

Level 4

1,187 points

Aug 11, 2020 9:12 PM in response to raffetazarius

What programs have you installed on your Mac Pro? How were they installed (Drag and Drop, Mac App Store, macOS Install)? And when did this start happening?

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Kernel panic when opening About This Mac > Storage and waiting 20-30 secs (Catalina 10.15.6)

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