Level 1

5 points

Kernel panics on Mountain Lion are normal?

I made the mistake of upgrading my Mac Pro to Mountain Lion. Since then, I've been plagued by several nasty issues. They are:

4 to 5 kernel panics per day now on average. In the previous 4 years of owning this machine, I'd only seen one total before Mountain Lion.
Preferences are not being retained when saved. This is especially maddening in Mail where I have to correct a mail setting every single time it launches (or restarts from a hard freeze/kernel panic)
Whenever a kernel panic happens, the contents of my two monitors are swapped. What is supposed to display on the left display jumps to the right display and the contents of the right display move to the left display. This includes menubar, desktop images and my geektool scripts.
While not technically a bug, I feel completely mislead by Apple regarding Airplay capabilities. I upgraded solely for this one feature only to learn that my 8-core, 12Gb of RAM, Dual Video Cards and SSD Raid is not sufficient to utilize this feature. This is incredibly dishonest marketing on Apple's part.

Any suggestions on how to proceed? I'm leaning towards reverting back to Lion and askin

Posted on Aug 10, 2012 1:05 PM

156 replies

Jsh111

Level 1

14 points

Dec 29, 2012 1:42 PM in response to wardiefromnsw

Thanks. I've done some more testing. Something about running a virtual machine - either VMWare or Parallels (latest versions on both) accentuates the problem. With no VM I have had a few days now of uptime. If I try to use the VM I crash almost immediately. The whole computer just freezes up and has to be manually power cycled. I think by now I've toggled every thing there is to be toggled and updated everything there is to be updated. Sadly my formerly great triple 30" mac pro warhorse is getting downgraded to paperweight status until someone at Apple bothers to fix this. I suppose that with half the planetary GDP sitting on their balance sheet in cash they are too resource contrained to fix these bugs in a timely manner.

Jan 4, 2013 7:18 PM in response to Carl Sieber

I'm a little late to the party, but am having identical problems:

Mac Pro (early 2009), with three GT120's, each driving an ACD30. System was solid with Lion and before, but started KP'ing immediately after upgrading to 10.8.2, with a log usually showing an nVidia driver. Exhaustive RAM tests show no problems. I can usually go a few days between KP's, but I used to go years without any.

I need 3 displays, so would need at least 2 video cards. Rather than messing around with an asymmetrical solution involving an expensive dual-link converter, I figured it was better to just go with a third GT120, which didn't cost a lot more than the adapter. I also figured this would give me the added advantage of more aggregate GPU power for better graphics and/or Grand Central performance. But it seems like extra cards may actually slow things down, especially when a window spans two displays.

In the past, I often did have problems with Apple's nVidia drivers. But these problems were mainly screen artifacts or poor performance that was solved by installing the drivers from nVidia. Kernel Panics are new with ML.

I really find that Apple's software quality has declined considerably over the past decade. It used to be very rare for me to run into problems or crashes, but it's become a daily occurrence - across multiple systems and apps. Safari has been unusable since 5.1 (I've switched to Chrome), Mail.app has numerous glitches, hangs, crashes. Aperture 4.x has a host of unresolved problems, some dating back to day 1 and reported multiple times. iCloud sync still has major problems. Apple is intentionally obsolescing their own devices (USB Fax Modem, previous models of Airport Express and Extreme, etc.) at an alarming rate, and leaving many bugs unfixed. Sadly, it's been a long time since the "it just works" days.

Kolz

Level 1

0 points

Jan 14, 2013 4:36 PM in response to Carl Sieber

http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-304.00.05f02-driver.html

Jan 23, 2013 1:38 PM in response to Kolz

Thanks for posting the link to retail drivers. I have a Mac Pro with GTX 285 and suffer from same KP's and it is usually when I have a video or video application open and using a program like Cinema 4D and each application on a separate display (I am dual display, 1 card).

The common factor seems to be the fact of having some video application loaded, generally when it is also playing video.

I hope to test this driver tonight! I am praying it fixes!

Jan 24, 2013 9:51 AM in response to helluvapixel

Well, I tried the drives from nvidia and the panic situation got worse. The issue also was not limited to just dual displays either.

For some reason the GTX 285 on ML is flawed and unstable. I have reverted back to Snow Leopard and I will reassess my upward path and whether I should go onto Lion or not. I have an early Mac Pro 2009 8-core and I suppose jumping up to ML with a retail nvidia was too much a stretch.

I hope others find better solutions than I did.

Feb 3, 2013 2:35 PM in response to Kolz

Just my anecodtal experience for anyone else who was getting intermittent NVIDIA panics on their MacPros: I installed the 304.00.05f02 drivers and my intermittent panics became regular and very reproducable. In my case, the machine *always* panics when waking up from sleep (user initiated or automated power sleep wakeups).

10.8.2 users, I'd recommend against installing the 304.00.05f02 drivers.

I really hope something new is coming out with the impending 10.8.3 release. This is getting incredibly aggravating.

Carl Sieber Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 3, 2013 2:48 PM in response to atomic!

Same here.

I get the same kernel panics as before when using anything with video (flash/silverlight/html5). The good news for me is that when my machine used to crash, it would literally switch the contents of my two monitors upon restart. If I had the file bar on the left display, it would be on the right display when it started up again (desktop image and all). Thankfully that has stopped. Sadly, the crashes are awfully consistent still.

I do want to note that I appreciate the effort on Apple and Nvidia's part by at least releasing a driver update. It may have taken a while, but this is the first time an official 3rd-party driver or update has supported an oem card. Maybe I'm mistaken, but that doesn't seem normal. Let's hope the next one takes care of the rest of the issues.

Feb 5, 2013 8:05 AM in response to Carl Sieber

I'm so frustrated!!! I can't rely on my computer to do any work. If I sum it up, I lost a couple of ours of work from this. Sooo disappointed 😟

Feb 5, 2013 9:36 AM in response to Amar Singh

I was having the same problems as others here with multiple nVidia cards. (I have 3 GT120's.) I was seeing several kernel panics a week. It's been a month now since I installed nVidia's own retail drivers (304.00.05f02), and I haven't seen a kernel panic since.

Feb 5, 2013 6:17 PM in response to LucasGustavo

For what it's worth-

My problems with Kernel Panics on my iMac 27" has been fixed by removing one 4GB ram chip and leaving 16 GB total installed (4,8,8). The only problem I have now is waking from sleep mode activated in the Apple->Sleep menu. Upon waking, I get a grey screen with the apple symbol and 3 beeps repeating.

IF however I let the computer go to sleep on it's own it wakes up fine. I have given up trying to fix this relatively minor problem The Kernel Panics are GONE and that's all I really care about.

I do not have an Nvidia card.

Feb 5, 2013 11:49 PM in response to wardiefromnsw

wardiefromnsw wrote:

For what it's worth-

My problems with Kernel Panics on my iMac 27" has been fixed by removing one 4GB ram chip and leaving 16 GB total installed (4,8,8). The only problem I have now is waking from sleep mode activated in the Apple->Sleep menu. Upon waking, I get a grey screen with the apple symbol and 3 beeps repeating.

IF however I let the computer go to sleep on it's own it wakes up fine. I have given up trying to fix this relatively minor problem The Kernel Panics are GONE and that's all I really care about.

I do not have an Nvidia card.

Yes, hardware problems like faulty RAM chips are usually the likelier culprits, so it is not surprising that removing the 4GB may have made KP cease. However, maybe you still have RAM problems.

The three beeps are supposed to indicate a RAM problem, so maybe one of the other chips is still not OK.

techmag

Level 1

4 points

Feb 12, 2013 1:00 PM in response to Carl Sieber

For the sake of those wanting to squeak in unison so it finally gets through to Apple's tin ear: please tweet #iBroken each and every time you crash with this error please and/or RT this: https://twitter.com/Technical_Magic/status/301433420293214208

Mar 7, 2013 12:52 PM in response to Carl Sieber

Would someone mind looking at one of my now all too frequent panic reports and tell me if its more than likely the dual nvidia card issue?

I run 2 30 ACD's and recently installed a Samsung SSD and thought perhaps that was the problem. But would appreciate any insight on my report:

Interval Since Last Panic Report: 424962 sec

Panics Since Last Report: 1

Anonymous UUID: A42D88FF-2238-7D47-AED4-F3F719196ED5

Mon Mar 4 16:34:24 2013

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff801e451c07): "IOGMD: not wired for the IODMACommand"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-2050.18.24/iokit/Kernel/IOMemoryDescriptor.c pp:1424

Backtrace (CPU 2), Frame : Return Address

0xffffff81f1ac3500 : 0xffffff801e01d626

0xffffff81f1ac3570 : 0xffffff801e451c07

0xffffff81f1ac3600 : 0xffffff801e44c9de

0xffffff81f1ac36b0 : 0xffffff801e44d60a

0xffffff81f1ac36d0 : 0xffffff7f9e725a44

0xffffff81f1ac3740 : 0xffffff7f9e78fd85

0xffffff81f1ac3790 : 0xffffff7f9e78feaf

0xffffff81f1ac37e0 : 0xffffff7f9e775515

0xffffff81f1ac3860 : 0xffffff7f9e773815

0xffffff81f1ac38a0 : 0xffffff7f9e762083

0xffffff81f1ac3950 : 0xffffff7f9e78c177

0xffffff81f1ac3b40 : 0xffffff7f9e78d1d8

0xffffff81f1ac3c10 : 0xffffff7f9f802419

0xffffff81f1ac3d50 : 0xffffff7f9f801efe

0xffffff81f1ac3d60 : 0xffffff7f9f7d9cfb

0xffffff81f1ac3d70 : 0xffffff7f9f7b0580

0xffffff81f1ac3db0 : 0xffffff7f9f7aedc2

0xffffff81f1ac3de0 : 0xffffff7f9f7b2eef

0xffffff81f1ac3e00 : 0xffffff7f9f14b2a4

0xffffff81f1ac3e20 : 0xffffff7f9f14b237

0xffffff81f1ac3e50 : 0xffffff7f9f7ca8ac

0xffffff81f1ac3e80 : 0xffffff7f9f7af506

0xffffff81f1ac3ed0 : 0xffffff7f9f7ad4c7

0xffffff81f1ac3ef0 : 0xffffff801e4472a8

0xffffff81f1ac3f30 : 0xffffff801e445daa

0xffffff81f1ac3f80 : 0xffffff801e445ed9

0xffffff81f1ac3fb0 : 0xffffff801e0b26b7

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:

com.apple.NVDAResman(8.0)[A4C53A36-22B6-3075-82B9-9DE612A9C015]@0xffffff7f9e71f 000->0xffffff7f9ea21fff

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.7.2)[B1B77B26-7984-302F-BA8E-544DD3D75E73]@0xffff ff7f9e68d000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(2.3.5)[86DDB71C-A73A-3EBE-AC44-0BC9A38B9A44]@0xff ffff7f9e70b000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(2.3.5)[803496D0-ADAD-3ADB-B071-8A0A197DA53D]@0 xffffff7f9e6c8000

com.apple.GeForce(8.0)[2E56ED9A-D848-3795-9E52-56BABDC9000C]@0xffffff7f9f7a9000 ->0xffffff7f9f86bfff

dependency: com.apple.NVDAResman(8.0.0)[A4C53A36-22B6-3075-82B9-9DE612A9C015]@0xffffff7f9e7 1f000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(2.3.5)[86DDB71C-A73A-3EBE-AC44-0BC9A38B9A44]@0xff ffff7f9e70b000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.7.2)[B1B77B26-7984-302F-BA8E-544DD3D75E73]@0xffff ff7f9e68d000

dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(2.3.5)[803496D0-ADAD-3ADB-B071-8A0A197DA53D]@0 xffffff7f9e6c8000

com.apple.iokit.IOSurface(86.0.3)[578CEAAD-1465-3B29-B34F-09586288ED88]@0xfffff f7f9f147000->0xffffff7f9f158fff

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task

Mac OS version:

12C60

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,138 points

Mar 7, 2013 4:09 PM in response to SuperGooch

Where's the rest of it?

Mar 7, 2013 5:58 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney for the reply. Here's the whole report.