Do the crashing WindowServer / Watchdog issues persist?

[dolmark]

Hi all

Just wondering if anyone has seen the WindowServer crash, followed by Watchdog catching and rebooting, which many of us have seen in Catalina/Big Sur

One of many threads: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...checkins-from-com-apple-windowserver.2222878/

Or the Apple censored one : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250715149

 

[eugenios]

I have this question too..

 

[eugenios]

So far after Monterey installation I had the following behavior - issue related to the graphic interface:

windowserver memory occupation grows bigger (> 5GB) and faster than in Big Sur.

Suddenly without clear reason the graph interface starts act slow when moving between spaces-applications with > 1 sec lags and also if video are playing in VLC or whatever are frozen both audio and video.

Without rebooting the memory occupation reach > 10GB and also the paging started to grow (iMac 2019 with 64GB Ram), and reached the point when the screen went black (the backlight was not switched off) and UI was not answering anymore.

When this happened in Big Sur most of the time a KP occurred, instead in Monterey now I was able to reboot by ssh login from iPhone and launching a "sudo shutdown - h now".

 

[eugenios]

Also for Monterey I confirm the WindowServer crash, caused by watchdog-triggered termination event

 

[JonathanX64]

As far as I know (tested personally but obviously could miss something), WindowServer crash is a hardware issue first.

It happens if your GPU isn't perfect. Like if ASIC quality is a little bit lower than expected when AMD produced that exact chip sitting in your Mac, or if it's degraded over time because of bad thermal solution by Apple.

Now of course, macOS should be able to recover from such crash instead of crashing completely with a kernel panic... but still, if you have this trouble, look into your GPU.

 

[WeatherWeasel]

at times the imac is slower than a turtle in a rabbit race. I have done just about everything including rebooting. I see that the Windowsserver seems to hog a lotof the memory, writes and so forth. enough to make me want to scream. I have 32G Ram and I shouldn't have this with nothing else but Time Machine running. I have even scheduled my iDrive backups for night when I am asleep.

I also notice it keeps waking up the screen when it shouldn't. there are bugs in this verison as we have seen , hopefully we will learn of some updates being sent to whomever?

 

[Donoban]

As far as I know (tested personally but obviously could miss something), WindowServer crash is a hardware issue first.

It happens if your GPU isn't perfect. Like if ASIC quality is a little bit lower than expected when AMD produced that exact chip sitting in your Mac, or if it's degraded over time because of bad thermal solution by Apple.

Now of course, macOS should be able to recover from such crash instead of crashing completely with a kernel panic... but still, if you have this trouble, look into your GPU.

You sure man? That’s a lot of hardware failures happening around the time of OS updates.

Hardware diagnostics doesn’t detect anything but who knows how thorough this process is.

 

[JonathanX64]

You sure man? That’s a lot of hardware failures happening around the time of OS updates.

Hardware diagnostics doesn’t detect anything but who knows how thorough this process is.

I'm somewhat sure
Had this issue on a Hackintosh with a faulty R9 380. Replaced it with another graphics card, issue was instantly gone.

What's going on here is that macOS renders UI in 3D mode on a GPU, and uses Metal API for that (since El Capitan). When macOS sends out a draw call to the GPU and does not get a response, it does not know how to process this situation, so it simply freezes and gives user aforesaid kernel panic.

On Windows, such situation would cause a driver crash, but system will easily recover from it in ~10 seconds and will keep on working as before.

 

[CasualFanboy]

This happened yesterday on my 3-day-old 2021 MBP M1 Pro. I doubt it's hardware related.

 

[Donoban]

I'm somewhat sure
Had this issue on a Hackintosh with a faulty R9 380. Replaced it with another graphics card, issue was instantly gone.

What's going on here is that macOS renders UI in 3D mode on a GPU, and uses Metal API for that (since El Capitan). When macOS sends out a draw call to the GPU and does not get a response, it does not know how to process this situation, so it simply freezes and gives user aforesaid kernel panic.

On Windows, such situation would cause a driver crash, but system will easily recover from it in ~10 seconds and will keep on working as before.

The same type of card or a different model?

No doubt hardware issues would cause crashes. But man, I’ve hardly used the dedicated gpu. I only noticed the issue when I turned off auto switching so games would be forced to use the dedicated card.

In my MacBook Pro I have the Vega 16.

I’ve done a clean install and not installing any third party products to see if I can re-produce the issue.

 

[Nermal]

I don't believe it to be a hardware issue. As noted, it affects both AMD and Arm machines. Also, World of Warcraft was affected for a while, but Blizzard (WoW developer) did something ~6 months ago and the problem's now gone away while playing. I'm guessing that one particular API is problematic and that Blizzard has worked around it.

I was having the issue a lot last year, but I've only seen it once since the Blizz fix (while playing a different game).

 

[JonathanX64]

The same type of card or a different model?

Different model; from the mix of 7750, R9 280, R9 290X, R9 380 and RX 580 only that one gave me WindowServer crash issue, and I'm almost certain that it's somehow related to the GPU.