MacOS Monterey upgrade: Immediate kernel panic trying to browse an SMB server share

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Hi, I was running Monterey on my MacBook then the touchpad stopped working, it went to get fixed, came back and then started crashing around 8-10 times per day with the same details as you "kernel panic" , it was then sent away by Apple and went to Czech Republic last week, I got it back yesterday and said they could not reproduce the issue I reported. it has come back with Catalina installed on it, not the latest Monterey. Why would they not have installed the latest software? its now asking me to install. I'm confused. My MacBook was 13 months old when it first started playing up and I'm not impressed!

      Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
         com.apple.filesystems.smbfs
            dependency: com.apple.kec.corecrypto
            dependency: com.apple.kext.triggers

The panic is happening in the SMB drivers, so it is possible your SMB server is generating a protocol message that is not being handled correctly by the macOS SMB drivers.

If you have more than 1 kernel panic, check to see if they are all in the com.apple.filesystems.smbfs driver? If they are, then I'm thinking you have found a bug in the macOS driver.

If they are in random places, then I would ask if you have 3rd party RAM in your iMac? 3rd party RAM is a frequent cause of kernel traps page faults.

HOWEVER, the fact that you said this happens when you attempt to connect with your Windows SMB server, strong suggests this is NOT a RAM issue, but rather you have found a bug in the macOS SMB code. You should contact Get Support and keep escalating this issue until you get as high as you can go in the food chain.

You could also get a free macOS https://Developer.apple.com account, and file a bug report.

JillyB73 wrote:

Hi, I was running Monterey on my MacBook then the touchpad stopped working, it went to get fixed, came back and then started crashing around 8-10 times per day with the same details as you "kernel panic" , it was then sent away by Apple and went to Czech Republic last week, I got it back yesterday and said they could not reproduce the issue I reported. it has come back with Catalina installed on it, not the latest Monterey. Why would they not have installed the latest software? its now asking me to install. I'm confused. My MacBook was 13 months old when it first started playing up and I'm not impressed!

I do not think your system panic is related to what 'playdohsniffer' is experiencing.

I still think it is a bug in the Monterey SMB drivers, but

-Yes, I do have 3rd party (G.Skill Apple-certified) RAM installed. I've never had any page fault-related kernel panic (2017 iMac).

-The co-incidental timing that my memory went bad exactly when I installed MacOS Monterey seems a little far-fetched.

Technically, many years ago, a new Mac OS X release started causing all kinds of memory panics (random locations) because the operating system optimized some code that hammered away at some locations in memory a lot harder than previous releases, and the "marginal" memory some 3rd party vendors were shipping started to see failures.

It has been a lot of years since that occurred, but as I said technically, it is possible for an operating system release to cause memory problems.

But your problem seems to be 1-for-1 with accessing your Windows SMB server, and my 50 years of being a paid programmer (starting at UNIVAC in 1972, while still a college student) says this is an an SMB driver issue.

Apple switched away from Samba because it became GPLv3 licensed, which is poison to proprietary software vendors like Apple. However, I think you can still install it. Homebrew <https://brew.sh> says it has a package

brew install samba

I do not know much about how you would set it up and configure it, so just consider this a suggestion/maybe workaround until Apple fixes their bug.

For years, Apple used the open source Samba code. But once it went GPLv3, they either had to give up on SMB or write their own. They chose to write there own.

But writing a network file sharing protocol is non-trivial, and there are a lot of "Unwritten" expectations that are not in the specifications. Back in the '90's I worked on a project to make an AppleShare Filing Protocol server on a VAX/VMS system. Apple even had a hardback book published with the specifications, and I read that thing front and back and over again. It was non-trivial getting that server to work. And then Apple would release new protocol messages as an addendum which you would have to printout and study.

NOTE: I did not write the server alone, and the original project actually purchased someone else's server which we then enhanced. But it was still a lot of work, and some things you could only learn by studying the protocol messages as they were exchanged to actually understand what was expected. And you would see to bits set that did not make sense, but if you did not handle them, things did not work the same for your server as they did for the Apple provided servers.

So I can imaging that the specs for the SMB protocol do not tell you everything, and that even if you think you understand the protocol, until you actually sniff the packets going between 2 Windows machines, and compare them against the packets between your machine and Windows, you will have a difficult time getting everything just right. And then Microsoft will change how they do things, and you are in a panic trying to figure out what changed.

Been there, done that, it is not fun. But they pay you on time and I did have fun a lot of fun along the way.