"iMac Pro" kernel crash

So my problem has been temporary solved these are the step I took

1) I erased my hard drive and reloaded mac os

2) i disabled sleep and power nap

3) I removed a sonnet chassis on the the thunderbolt drive that contained a PCIe card ( this seemed to be the solution)

It seems when this card was on the thunderbolt connection to the computer at the same time my la cie hard drive was on thunderbolt crashes occurred frequently. they were never daisy chained and had their own port. Disconnecting either seemed to solve random crashes.The card inside was a universal audio card.

the crashes that happened overnight stopped when I disabled power nap.

4) As others thought the crash is related to daisy chaining I disagree as on another thunderbolt port i have several hard drives daisy chained. It seems certain devices are not playing well together on the thunderbolt data pipe wether or not they are on the same port or not.

I will update if I have any more crashes. The problem is now I can't use my Universal audio PCIe card 😟

OK you're not going to believe this. Here's the "reason" for my crashes. One of my Thunderbolt channels was configured:

1. Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter

2. LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 1 1TB SSD

3. LaCie D2 3TB Thunderbolt 2 HDD

No problem, right? Well up to the point that the Thunderbolt D2 started to break down. We'll never know if it was a crash or a component failure or all this mis-matched Thunderbolt channel stuff, or what's reported earlier in this thread (don't daisy-chain). In any case, by the time we figured it out, my drive was toast. Couldn't bring it back even with DiskWarrior on a native Thunderbolt 2 iMac. Ran for 2 days and just threw Bad Blocks. So I killed it. Now when I took the disk off the iMac Pro and moved it to the iMac to run DiskWarrior (and turned off Power Nap) the reboots completely stopped.

Here's what's bad. Whether the iMac Pro killed my disk or not, we don't know. But what we do know is that no amount of bad disk should cause a "PANIC!!! BAD MAGIC!!!" exception and just roll over. So Apple says they're all over this and we should see some updates coming out shortly. My supporter has been added to the notify queue and she will alert me when the fix goes into a production state. Because I want to daisy-chain like normal.

Good luck, all!

I had a very nice 2-week engagement with Mike, an Apple engineer, who gave me his “strong, personal recommendation” not to daisy-chain the drives, but keep them on separate ports. He was clear to say this was not an Apple statement, since they support the standard and the standard allows this... but it was abundantly clear how he felt about it... (thanks again, Mike, because I know you read this thread!). Will you have more than 4 drives?

A side comment - I would also try very hard to not have speed mismatches on the TB port. You stick a TB1 device into a TB3-to-TB2 adapter, and put a TB2 device behind that and you’re asking for buffer overruns and problems (like I did - and had!)

That said, it’s of course your decision...

Okay after 3 visits to replace my motherboard by Apple premium support company, Apple has decided to replace my machine. My hope that this is hardware problem they have fixed but based on these posting, it appears Apple is not externally acknowledging this is a problem. If it is a "chip issue", how long would this take to fix??? I will let you know if my new machine that Apple is sending me solves the problem. I keep asking all the engineers and "highest level of support" folks if they are aware and they saw no. Just like everyone else is saying in this thread. Only thing that makes me optimistic is this did not start happing until I had the machine for probably 6 months. I encourage everyone to use the proprietary Apple app CAPTURE DATA and have your machine crash logs and other files uploaded to Apple engineering. Remember my files using this app were 3 large files over 1 gig each and I had to do it twice until Apple engineering said he was the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 embedded video card on the logic/motherboard that was causing the crashes. We need more folks to do the Capture Data thing to see if everyone is having a hardware issue like mine was diagnosed to have. I hope the new machine does not have the same issue, but an earlier post said he had gotten 2 new machines and they all kept crashing. How long does it take to make a redesign video chip, I would think long.

MC

So, I got a call from Apple Support about this issue on Friday. We talked for an hour, time in which I explained when it happens and when it doesn't happen. He was watching with me what I was doing, what settings I had enabled or disabled and he witnessed the crash with me. In my case if I have the power saving settings turned on + the apple watch login + asking for the password after sleep or lock it crashes either in sleep or when I export 4K video in Final Cut Pro. Once I disable all those settings the machine runs fine. It never restarts while sleeping and I am able to export my 4K videos. This gives me hope, because it could be only a software issue.

For anyone else who was looking for more info on this topic and owns an iMac pro base model like me:

I was getting kernel panics, mostly while using Premiere/After Effects, also my wifi would sometimes freak out.

Took to apple care, they replaced the logic board, didn't help. After chatting with Apple support they said it was related to the software on the computer not being able to contact a server and freaking out, making it kernel panic and restart.

I have little snitch installed on my computer to monitor internet traffic, I uninstalled it and used the open source software Lulu instead and it completely fixed my problem. The computer has not had a single kernel panic in over a week, it used to have a panic 2-3 times per day while doing video editing.

Hope that helps someone else. I'll be avoiding Little Snitch from now on.

First, what’s connected on Thunderbolt? I stopped daisy-chaining any devices at the strong recommendation of Apple, this is very important. This made a difference.

Second, change Energy Saver settings. Most important turn off Power Nap. This also made a difference in reducing the problem.

Third, don’t unlock with Apple Watch. Really! I can’t go into details on this other than to say there is a problem that is being addressed by Apple Engineering.

Fourth, (which you already did) First Aid your internal SSD (active mode is OK) to see if it throws 3 different errors that include:

warning: crypto_val: object

Apple says wipe and reload from scratch. I have not done this, but am concerned about what this means.

There you have it. I have gone from 3 PANIC’s a day to none in over a week. We’ll see...

I can corroborate this. I turned off power nap, disabled file vault, and disabled unlock with apple watch. I've not seen a kernel panic since. I still have the crypto_val: object warning, and I don't have time to deal with that so Im leaving it for now. I also have 2 thunderbolt devices daisy chained.(Universal Audio Apollo 8 and additional UAD satellite) and that hasn't made any difference in the crashing. Im definitely thinking in my case it was Power nap, as letting my iMac sit overnight usually meant I had to hard boot it in the am.

I made some progress - probably somebody could verify if this

helps on other systems as well.

First, I’ve checked how often and when the system rebooted: (terminal)

last reboot

Second, I’ve checked the reboot reason: (terminal)

log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 72h

code 5 is ok, I see mostly -20 but I nowhere found a correct description for this code but for sure it’s an abnormal termination.

Third, I’ve changed energy settings to (within system preferences)

• disable automatic …. when display is turned off 1
• hard disk to sleep 0
• wake for network 0 (Attention – result is that the system can’t be controlled anymore via ARD when in sleep mode etc.)
• start up after power failure 0
• power nap 0 (a few otherones wrote this as well)

Fourth, I’ve changed the hibernate mode to 0 (terminal)

(check actual status)

pmset -g

(change to mode 0, Attention: uses a bit more power)

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Attention, I’ve realized whenever changes are made in the energy settings the system switches back to hibernatemode 3

So far (1 day :-))) no crashes / kernel panics anymore

I've got them as well - I've tried everything without any success.

Solution was:

1. make a Timemachine backup
2. boot in recovery mode
3. erase / format the system disc
4. restore from Timemachine

Took me approx. 3 hours but it was worth doing it, because the number of errors increased over time and even if Apple stated they can be ignored plenty of users reported some irrational behavior after running disc repair!

Errors are gone 🙂

Just return your iMac Pro for full refund. The issue has not been dealt with since the release of this machine late last year. Wait for the next iteration of the hardware as the problem is most likely a hardware issue with Apple T2 chip which is part of the motherboard and clearly not fully debugged as yet. Reconsider buying when and if they fix the problem. Returning buggy iMac Pros sends a clear message to Apple we are not going to pay premium price for so called "pro" machine unless it is fully functional. We understand that unexpected problems may emerge with newly released hardware (and software) but we also expect the problems to be dealt with promptly and we are informed about the progress. I concur with other contributors that Apple Support responses (wrongly) suggest that no other users are experiencing this problem and that we should follow the forums. It is not for us to come up with solutions – Apple needs to do its bit!

For most people that seems to do the trick. Did you do a complete erase and then reinstall MacOS from the macOS Recovery when you boot in that mode. Because I believe that if you just do a restore, you put back everything, including any software errors in the OS. Now funny enough I went about two weeks without a panic error reboot and then got one. I am not sure if this had anything to do with it at all, but I had left Google Chrome open. Since I then I have closed all the browsers including Safari when I am done for the day and I have not had the error again. Here is the link for how to erase and reinstall.

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support

Also have you ran First Aid from the utilities application and see if you get a crypto val error? If so then you still potentially have something wrong with you OS and erasing and reinstalling should take care of that.

Apple just called me with an update. They said that my crash logs show three things that are causing crashes right now. Crashplan, Backblaze, and something called Aladdin HASP.

• Crashplan is an online backup service.
• Backblaze is also an online backup service. (I have two because my Crashplan is expiring and I'm replacing it with Backblaze).
• Aladdin HASP, from what I can tell is a security KEXT installed by some unknown software that is used to ensure it's DRM protected. This could be from Adobe Creative Suite (Apple thinks). But not entirely sure.

I'm in the process of killing all these processes to see if that stops the crashing from happening. But Aladdin HASP doesn't show up as a process. I can probably dig around and find the KEXT to remove, but not sure what it will do to any of my software that I require, and has been working for the last 6 months without these crashes.