Q: Mountain Lion freezing

I have since extracted my MBP logic board and carefully applied heat on and around the NVIDIA chip. The video corruption is no longer present and the system has been performing well. Mountain Lion remains installed.

I have very similar symptom as you described, except that I get complete lock up including the mouse pointer whenever I try to open a big Quicktime file or access HD youtube movies. Quicklook of movie files does the same thing and fails to show the movie at all. Lock up would go away if I wait long enough, say 30sec to 1min, but it still drives me nuts. I sense that GPU of my 2010 Macbook Air doesn't want handling big graphics load.

S.Wu wrote:

 

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What I've found is that it gets triggered by pretty much anything that puts a load on the graphics processing i.e. video playback streaming and local playback, games (i.e. Starcraft 2), etc.. Essentially you'll running your video or game for a time (seems to be random) and the system locks up. In my specific instance the freezing can be triggered sooner the more I tax any portion of the graphics system. ..

Ok. It seems that in my case the obsolete 'Perian' extension may have been the culprit. Once I disabled it and restarted the MBA, QT movie files seem to open without any lag or lock up. I won't declare that it fixed everything yet but if anyone still has perian installed under Mountain Lion I recommend disabling it.

Okay... seems as though 10.8.1 has resolved the issue for me. Thank goodness...

I just installed Mountain Lion last weekend and now our iMac is a total disaster. Most of the apps either don't open at all or are really slow to open. I even have to wait several minutes for the spinning beachball to stop after opening System Preferences. Anything I click on inside SysPref starts the spinner again and hence I have to wait even more to check things. All the sound devices have disappeared in SysPref, including the Internal Audio, even though the computer makes the usual startup sound when it boots up. Someone advises resetting PRAM, but that does not work either. The computer just keeps re-booting. If any of you know another way to reset PRAM, please let me know. I have already done the SMC reset. My system and therefore my work has been dead in the water for three days now, so I appreciate any help you can give.

OS X is damaged. Press Command and R keys in boot and reinstall

System Preferences > Energy Saver > Computer Sleep > Never

This has been the only thing to work for me.  Ever since update to 10.8, greater than 6 freezes a day and hard resets.  24 hours with out a freeze since changing this setting.  Hope this helps... it appears there are a slew of bugs.

And I got rid of "Perian", an old version of ClickToFlash and LittleSnitch. Now the chrashes are down to a minimum.

Still the system is slow and I also had troubles without any third party software but now my computer is a least usable again...

I actually shut down all programs that were running and put the computer to sleep... soon after waking it froze when opening Safari.  I even closed down all running 3rd party apps in the menu bar prior to.  I'm back to normal without the computer going into sleep state.  No freeze in a day with multiple programs/apps running (Safari, iTunes, Parallels, Handbrake, and all my usual 3rd party apps running in the background/menu bar). BTW, Perian is running as well as Click to Flash and 1Password.  Let you know if it stumbles but got my fingers crossed.

I solved a similar problem that occurred when I installed Mountain Lion on top of Lion a couple of weeks ago. Mountain Lion turned into a Sloth immediately after the install. It not only began generating the spinning beach ball whenever I did  anything, but it prevented me from opening SysPref to make any changes, all of the sound devices disappeared, I could only open three resident apps and none of my installed software would open, i.e. Final Cut Pro, Logic, Soundtrack, Avid Symphony 6, Maestro 2, etc.

Well, after waiting for tech support to come up with a better plan than a full system reinstall, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I ran a simple app written by a discussion forum user called EtreCheck that basically finds corrupt sys files that failed to install. I then searched the web to find out what these files were for and discovered that they were fragments left over from Snow Leopard. The moment I deleted the first two, all of the sound devices reappeared, the spinning beachball disappeared, I could open every app for the first time in ML as well as SysPref. Mountain Lion basically came to life for the first time! What also reappeared in SysPref as an audio device was a Euphonix Monitor device that I thought I had removed weeks ago. One of the failed file sys files appeared to be a currupt audio driver. When I removed that one, Maestro 2 which is the software behind Apogee's Ensemble audio interface came to life as well. It was the only installed software that would open in ML, but it was nothing but a large gray panel without any faders, knobs, buttons or mixer. To make a long story short, Mountain Lion is now working better than Lion did. You might want to give this a try.  

Would you mind posting your EtreCheck so that I can compare with mine?

I'm having the same problem.  My system has locked up 4 times.  All 4 times I get the same log message regarding GPU restart:

MBP:log julio$ grep -i gpu /var/log/system*

/var/log/system.log.0:Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

/var/log/system.log.0:Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

/var/log/system.log.0:Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

/var/log/system.log.1:Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

Here's a bit more from each crash:

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: 0000006e

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: 00200000 0000902d 00000000 00000000

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 000002ac 00000003 0000000b

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 01004001

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000

Aug 17 10:37:37 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: 0000006e

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: 00200000 0000902d 00000000 00000000

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 000002ac 00000003 0000000b

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 01004001

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000

Aug 17 14:31:51 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: 0000006e

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: 00200000 0000902d 00000000 00000000

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 000002ac 00000003 0000000b

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 01004001

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000

Aug 18 11:51:14 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: IOVendorGLContext::ReportGPURestart

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: 0000006e

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: 00200000 0000902d 00000000 00000000

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 000002ac 00000003 0000000b

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 01004001

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000

Aug 16 11:35:46 MBP kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! exception type = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error

Anyone have any info on this?