"iMac Pro" kernel crash

I've been waiting to buy an iMac Pro since last year. After reading this thread, now I know why I hesitated. I will not spend one more dime on anything Apple until Tim Cook and the boys *** start getting back to some simple core values of customer service, transparency and honesty. Did a slew of engineers leave Apple since Jobs is gone? It's becoming a disgrace; please keep this post alive for all of us waiting on Apple to make a computer again that 'just works'.
I just watched the debacle unfold on the new MacBook Pro i9 throttle-gate. The fact that in 2018 Apple has no cooling system for their products is still a mystery to me. Is liquid cooling not possible on a macbook or imac? Is Apple engineering really this inept? I've avoided Windows like the plague since 2007, hate to think of going back....
thx...
[Edited by Host]

While its true that this is frustrating, and I'm the first being annoyed after spending so much on a computer... In the end its still the computer with the least number of issues I have, doesn't make it right, but the Windows & Linux machines I have are much more trouble than the iMac Pro / macOS.

If you need a fast and silent workstation with a great screen, its still the best you can buy. The iMac Pro has no throttling issue I could detect, whether its playing games, or coding... I dont do video processing, etc... so it might be different if you do that, but in my experience running games is by far "the worst case scenario" since it taxes the GPU & CPU...

Agreed. I’m not sure why I did this, but I just bought an i9 MacBook Pro. So now I have 2 T2 based macs. I noticed it was constantly running the fan(especially running VMware fusion/Windows 10, but that was common on my 2014 mbp as well.) I did feel a bit underwhelmed by the supposed 70% performance increase and it felt about the same as my 2014 with a 2.53ghz. I was going to give it another week and the return it if there wasn’t a fix issued.

I get the crypto Val error when running a disk check which did not make me very happy. Who is loading these machines? I buy a Mac because I don’t want to jack with installing and tweaking the OS.

Anyway I installed the i9 fix yesterday and am happy to report that things are significantly better. No fan constantly running and was able to get repeatable solid performance numbers in Geekbench 4. Repeat runs were in a few percentage points of each other and didn’t point to any throttling problems. I’m not in front of it right now but from memory single core performance was 53-5400 range and multi core was 22600 or so. Compute benchmark was not as great but still pretty good with ~22k for the intel graphics and 52k for the AMD graphics. On the open cl benchmark.

That performance is good enough that if I don’t see any improvement soon on the kernel panics I’m returning the iMac. I’m giving it another few weeks.

Craig,

Are you bothering to fix the crypto val errors, or just using the machine as is?

I’m trying to decide if this is just a cosmetic error in the disk Utility report or if I should invest the hours to do a wipe, format, and restore.

I’ve thus far decided to ignore the errors. I don’t have time to do the reinstall, and I have a bunch of challenge response software with limited installation counts. I’m really hoping that a software fix is in the works for this. I do think that at the very least it shows a level of sloppiness that is a new post jobs era. I write code for a living, I know software is hard. But come on Apple you have to be insanely great, not slightly above average or quirky.

Does someone smarter than me know what a crypto val error even is? It would be nice to know if it’s just harmless text in the report. Disk Utility does end up saying the disk is OK, despite these errors.

As you stated, a wipe and restore is not a short process, particularly on a 2-4TB drive.

I spent a fortune on an iMac Pro 10 core machine and I have to say that it is the first Mac computer that I have been unimpressed with. All of the problems people are talking about are similar to what I have experienced from day one. I’ve called Apple care numerous times, always met with “Oh, this is the first time I’ve heard about such a thing”. I can say that I finally in complete exasperation brought that machine into the Genius Bar over a long weekend and said “Fix it”. Apparently I was told it was a software issue and the operating system was reinstalled. My machine has functioned much better since then. I also do not use Skype anymore because when I would exit from Skype it would crash the whole computer and the computer would just restart.

I’ve never spent so much on a computer to be so unimpressed. Apple KNOWS they have a problem with this machine and are keeping really silent about this.

Completely agree that they know all about the problems and that this is a red flag issue in Apple Engineering. Like I said, this was the first time I finally broke through the Engineering blockade and spoke with an actual engineer, usually you are given several levels of interference.

Unfortunately, we're not going to know if they will fix the problem. If they sold 100K units and only 50 of us are having problems, they're not going to declare a chip / hardware failure and do a full replacement... but if we keep this thread alive, we can perhaps find out when they start delivering units that are working and get replacements then.

They’re not keeping silent. They’re actively trying to work out what’s causing the crashes. In my case, tech support collected a bunch of information and narrowed down the culprits to three possible applications that were causing crashes. In my case, it was a backup application that was backing up a Thunderbolt drive. I was in the process of switching backup applications and had the luxury of being able to uninstall the problem app. I’ve since not seen any crashes. If the application in question was something I needed for work, It would be a different story for me. But I’m glad they’re working through the issues.

Other than this issue cropping up for me (only recently) I’ve had no other issues, and found that the iMac Pro is probably one of the best Macs I’ve ever owned. The screen is amazing, and it’s a solid performer.

Some issues have been resolved. Thunderbolt was a big issue. Other issues are not resolved, like crashes during a full-out render and the whole sleep issue. There's a big cost in wear and tear to my external Thunderbolt drives because they can't be put to sleep... basically the only way my device doesn't crash is by disabling all sleep options and having it run 24x7, or constantly powering down. LOTS to do here yet and I expect it eventually...

iMac Pro 10 cores with 64Gb RAM.

Multiple KP occurred when unzipping simultaneously several 1Gb sound files on an external Thunderbolt 2 bay connected to the iMac via a T3-to-T2 adapter, and using the built-in Compression Utility (with Stuffit Expander things went a little better). I guess the issue is somewhere in the T3-to-T2 bridge, but I'm only a final user, not a technician... So I would like a fix without having to bring the iMac to the "nearest" Genius Bar (12,2 km from here). :-/

There are clearly Thunderbolt buffering issues, and for anything that's going to push the rated capacities or buffering or timing at the lower settings (T1, T2) you really have to move away from that. There are issues that they are clearly not talking about. Not your issue, but for example they "very strongly" advised from a "personal perspective" that you should not daisy chain. Only reason they would say that is if there were buffering or queuing problems.

I am extremely furious at this point. I can no longer export any video from FCP X. I know I have issues exporting 4K video but now I cannot export even 1080p video. So this machine became absolutely useless. Sorry, but I have to rely on a machine to edit and get video content out there. This is not it. Im gonna try to get a refund and get build a windows machine. I give up.

Had a call with my support engineer yesterday, who wanted me to find/remove a kernel extension named com.zerodebug.audiomuxdriver.kext. I did not have the extension on my iMac(at least not in the usual location) and I let spotlight search my machine and did not find it. There is at least one apple support thread that points to this extension causing kernel panics. I believe it is related to PACE copy protection, but Im not certain. Ive long loathed PACE software since the days when they would BSOD my windows computers. I had swore any software off that used this copy protection. I guess Im getting soft in my old age. Anyway, since we couldnt find the file, he was going to reach back out to the engineers and get the next steps.

That said, I am not 100% comfortable with how I see this going down. I may be getting the wrong impression here, but I get the feeling that if I can remove an offending application and stop the kernel panics, apple will consider this "solved". However, if I cannot reconfigure my iMac to the way I want it- (app nap, unlock with apple watch, etc) this is not solved for me. If I cannot daisy chain my UAD apollo to the additional uad2 dsps this machine is useless. I am happy (to a point) to help Apple determine the root cause, but I feel like right now they are only looking for rogue software. There is a variety of different software that seems to be causing this, so I dont really think its the software. Everything points to TB...

If an Apple engineer would like to come spend some time troubleshooting my setup, I will be a gracious host...

I've gone three days in a row without a crash since I unplugged my TB3->TB2 adapter from my 2018 MacBook Pro. I used to let it sleep with the adapter attached (but nothing attached to it was powered on) and it crashed with the Bridge OS error 5 nights out of the first 7 of ownership during sleep.

I've read that others have experienced crashes with nothing but the power adapter attached, but I haven't seen this on mine yet. However, I'm only on day three of unplugging everything before sleeping the computer so that may change.