How to Deal With Frequent Kernal Panics: 2017 iMac Retina 4K 21.5 Inch

There is no reason there should be heavy IO on this computer. Almost nothing I do involves a lot of IO. I mostly just use it for email, web browsing, Messages, some document processing (LibreOffice), photo editing now and then. I dabble with shell scripts, but none of them do much IO.

I should add here that I booted into Safe Mode and a kernel panic ensued a few minutes later when I was trying to do this post in Safari. I've switched to Firefox for the time being.

I'd never seen Google Drive like that before. When I took that screenshot I had booted into Safe Mode; something I'd never done before, so I didn't know what to expect. What I really didn't expect was what a slug the machine was in Safe Mode. It was barely useable. Instead of moving across the screen smoothly, the pointer moved in fits and starts. In text fields the insertion point simply disappeared now and then. I tried to use the machine that way, but was actually grateful when a kernel panic rebooted the machine in regular mode and the machine returned running normally. So weird. Is Safe Mode always like that?

BTW, I stopped Google Drive from starting up. That didn't stop the kernel panics. So, it's not Google Drive.

I'm unwilling to delete the Safari history as that will also delete all cookies and history across all devices. That's a bit much.

Allan Jones wrote:

Before resorting to reinstalling the OS, get rid of the malware which is likely adware. Some may indicate that you overrode system warnings to install them.

You've made the assertion that my machine has "malware", but you haven't provided any examples. As you know, EtreCheck never uses the term "malware", so I'm not sure where you're getting your information. I'd like to act on what you're saying, but I can't do that without more detail.

As for DropBox and Google Drive:

DropBox doesn't sync anything. All it does is upload photos from my iPhone to the iMac.

All Google Drive does is sync photos. It doesn't sync any data directories at all.

As for the shell scripts:

Almost all of the shell scripts I edit on the iMac actually run on Raspberry Pies; some local and some remote. I only have a few shell scripts that run on the iMac:

• There's one that checks the UPS battery and voltage status once a day.
• There's one that turns the iMac volume down to 1 at 4:00 AM so I won't be blasted by a loud machine early in the morning.
• There's another that removes old screenshots and scans. It runs once a month.
• There's another that runs when the iMac boots up. This was originally for those situations when the UPS battery died, the Mac shutdown and booted when power was restored. Unintentionally, it has also proved to be useful during this time of kernel panics. I always know when there's been a kernel panic, even when I'm not home.
• There's another that checks Internet bandwidth once an hour and sends me a Prowl notice and email if the bandwidth is lower than I'm paying for.
• There's another that runs a few times an hour in order to update my dynamic DNS service. (Their in-house client sucks.)
• There's another script that runs on demand which controls an old Canon Line 30 scanner which hangs off of a nearby Pi.
• And, finally, there's one resource intensive script that runs once a day. It downloads a couple of videos from my web host, adds a sound track and a fade in/fade out and then uploads the new videos to YouTube. The videos are only 45 seconds long, so the whole process is very fast. (The iMac has never had a kernel panic when this script is running.)

So, aside from the video script, there's really nothing that is resource intensive. Very little IO. Very little CPU time.

As for reinstalling or running from an external boot drive:

I may do one or both of these if I can't otherwise figure out what's going on. At the moment I'm running without the two external spinning drives that are USB-A. I haven't had a panic since I removed them, but it's only been four hours. It's not unusual for the iMac to go several days without a panic and then have three or four in 40 minutes.

As stated in the OP, I've already reinstalled MacOS:

• Booted in safe mode and reinstalled Monterey

I haven't changed this in years. I seem to remember it used to look different.

hcsitas wrote:

Check Prevent and uncheck the rest except Start up, might fix.

Can you explain why?

There used to be an option for "Never Sleep". I always enabled that. Where did it go?

Sorry, that didn’t work. I made the suggested changes and rebooted. A couple of hours later another kernel panic.

Sorry

Somewhat later: