After I updated to Big Sur, some kernel extensions prevented from booting

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berutoran Author

Level 1

20 points

After I updated to Big Sur, some kernel extensions prevented from booting

Hi,

I just updated from Catalina to Big Sur 11.1 and I get the following issue:

When I start the system, it fails to boot 5 times, then boots disabling third party kernel extensions.

A crash report tells me that the last loaded kernel extensions are :

loaded kexts:

com.shinywhitebox.iShowU-Audio-Capture 1.0.5

com.netgear.SelfProtect 1.3.0

com.kairos.driver.DuetDisplay 1

com.acronis.systeminterceptors 1.0.0 304

com.acronis.ngscan 2.0.0 602

com.acronis.notifyframework 2.0.25 689

com.acronis.fileprotector 3.0.0 1685

The problem is that:

I have not installed any application from Shiny White Box (I did download one, but not installed yet)
I used to use Acronis application in the past, but I fully uninstalled it 4 months ago

I would like to know :

How can I know what kernel extension(s) is/are the cause of boot fail?
How can I completely delete any unwanted kernel extension (i.e, Acronis extensions... although I did a """""clean""""" uninstall of the application and I can find any trace of such extension in the system library...

Many thanks in advance for any help.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Dec 15, 2020 10:15 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

berutoran Author

Level 1

20 points

Dec 16, 2020 9:03 PM in response to Barney-15E

I could solve the issue.

I went to /Library/Extensions and I checked one by one the content of each extension. By opening the Info.plist, I could get the name of the company, so I could select all extensions from Acronis and delete them. After a reboot, it worked fine. No more problem.

(Ones could say that Acronis made my life **** to the bitter end (can you imagine: after a certain MacOS and Acronis TI update last year, each time I tried to backup a full image of my internal SSD (that includes Boot Camp), it failed and corrupted Boot Camp in such a way that I had to delete Boot Camp, re-create it, re-install Windows10 and all my apps...!!! And the Acronis team did not even try to understand the problem...))

By the way, I also deleted the DuetDisplay extension

For your information: the kernel extensions signed by Netgear are part of the Netgear Armor subscription that includes a special (?) edition of Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac.

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

113,172 points

Dec 16, 2020 6:44 AM in response to berutoran

How can I know what kernel extension(s) is/are the cause of boot fail?

How can I completely delete any unwanted kernel extension (i.e, Acronis extensions... although I did a """""clean""""" uninstall of the application and I can find any trace of such extension in the system library...

I don't know how you can tell which one caused the problem.

What's a a """"""clean""""" uninstall" of Acronis? Did you use their uninstaller? If you did, it didn't completely uninstall itself.

Applications can embed kernel extensions into their app bundles and the OS will load them. Even if you didn't "install" the kernel extension, if the app is just an app bundle, it could have loaded the kext.

DuetDisplay has a history of causing problems.

What Netgear product needs a kernel extension?

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After I updated to Big Sur, some kernel extensions prevented from booting

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