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WindowServer Kernel Panic

Hi everyone,


Please help me understant what cause my mac to restart itself

it's really anoying!


Best Regards,

Lior Waitzman

Mac Pro, macOS 10.13

Posted on Oct 22, 2021 3:05 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 23, 2021 7:53 AM

At the moment it is too early to assume you have failing hardware. As I said it could be your RAM, or even corrupt macOS graphics driver software (less likely, but not impossible).


You might try running the hardware diagnostics

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731

  • Press and hold Option-D at startup to use Apple Diagnostics over the internet.

The consumer hardware diagnostics are not as extensive as what Apple can run if you take your Mac into an Apple Store with a Genius Bar appointment.


If it were RAM, you might want to run Rember overnight

http://www.kelleycomputing.net/rember

.

Quit as many apps and background tasks as you can (such as menu bar items) so more RAM is available for testing. Booting into Safe mode http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564 can also free up more RAM for testing, by not loading any 3rd party additions you may have installed.

.

Set Loops: [X] Maximum

and run overnight


As you have a Mac Pro, I'm not sure how well the following would work, but there is a utility gSwitch that can disable the discrete GPU (or at least it works on Macbook Pros that have a discrete graphics chip). If gSwitch will work for you, then run without the GPUs on your Mac. Yes it will be very slow for graphics work, but what you are trying to figure out is if eliminating the GPUs will prevent the system from panic'ing, which is a way of isolating the problem

https://codyschrank.github.io/gSwitch

Again, I'm not sure if it will work on a Mac Pro, but it will not hurt to give it a try.

8 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 23, 2021 7:53 AM in response to lior9994

At the moment it is too early to assume you have failing hardware. As I said it could be your RAM, or even corrupt macOS graphics driver software (less likely, but not impossible).


You might try running the hardware diagnostics

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731

  • Press and hold Option-D at startup to use Apple Diagnostics over the internet.

The consumer hardware diagnostics are not as extensive as what Apple can run if you take your Mac into an Apple Store with a Genius Bar appointment.


If it were RAM, you might want to run Rember overnight

http://www.kelleycomputing.net/rember

.

Quit as many apps and background tasks as you can (such as menu bar items) so more RAM is available for testing. Booting into Safe mode http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564 can also free up more RAM for testing, by not loading any 3rd party additions you may have installed.

.

Set Loops: [X] Maximum

and run overnight


As you have a Mac Pro, I'm not sure how well the following would work, but there is a utility gSwitch that can disable the discrete GPU (or at least it works on Macbook Pros that have a discrete graphics chip). If gSwitch will work for you, then run without the GPUs on your Mac. Yes it will be very slow for graphics work, but what you are trying to figure out is if eliminating the GPUs will prevent the system from panic'ing, which is a way of isolating the problem

https://codyschrank.github.io/gSwitch

Again, I'm not sure if it will work on a Mac Pro, but it will not hurt to give it a try.

Oct 22, 2021 12:09 PM in response to lior9994

It is in the graphic drivers, so it could be a failing Graphics card.


But it appears you have 3rd party RAM (Micron), so failing RAM can also cause kernel code to do the wrong thing.


You have some 3rd party kernel extensions

com.pcloud.pcloudfs.filesystems.pcloudfs	2080.16
com.paragon-software.filesystems.ntfs	106.5.15
de.rme-audio.driver.RMEFirefaceUSB	1

and of the 3, the rem-audio driver might (maybe) use the graphics subsystem for sound processing. This is a TOTAL guess.


You could try booting into Safe mode so that all the kernel caches are cleaned.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564


If you run in Safe mode, does the panic occur? A) this would only be a valid test if you panic a lot, and B) you can do any useful work without your 3rd party kernel extensions being loaded, and using much more conservative graphics drivers.


You could try re-installing macOS over top of itself, just in case there is a corrupted executable (low possibility).

Oct 23, 2021 6:52 PM in response to lior9994

The GPU on the 2013 Mac Pro are notorious for Kernel Panics. We've had multiple different types of GPU related Kernel Panics on most of our organization's Trashcan Mac Pros all of which were related to the GPU which your Kernel Panic is clearly referring. Please post several more of the Kernel Panic logs so we can see if there is any pattern to them. The Kernel Panic log file names begin with "kernel" and end in ".panic" and can be found in "/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports" if the logs exist.


If you have third party memory installed, then there is a chance it is a memory issue.


You have a lot of external drives connected so one of them could possibly be causing the issue. Disconnect all external devices to see if it solves the problem.


If you have multiple external displays connected, then make sure each display is connected to a different bus. Also connect your external Thunderbolt drive(s) to a bus not related to one of your connected displays. Here is a diagram showing which ports are using the same internal bus:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202801


My bet is on a defective GPU since I've seen so many of them fail in our organization. Apple even had a free repair program for some of these GPUs for exactly this issue (Kernel Panics), but most of our organization's Macs were not covered by the free repair program which is now expired. If it is a bad GPU, then do not even bother getting the GPU replaced. Replacing one GPU is not enough to resolve the issue (Apple actually replaced both installed GPUs with their now expired free repair program). There is also no guarantee the replacement GPU will be any better or how long it may last and these GPUs are expensive.

Oct 24, 2021 11:03 AM in response to lior9994

These two other panic logs show the same type of panic which for me most likely points to a bad GPU especially since I've seen most of our organization's MacPro (late 2013) models have confirmed GPU issues. However, there is still a chance one of the third party drivers installed is triggering this failure as mentioned by the other contributors, or perhaps with another external device sharing the same bus with your display.

WindowServer Kernel Panic

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