iMac Pro on 10.15.5 crashing frequently lately

[AnakChan]

Hi all, my iMac Pro has been crashing quite a bit lately. I've attached the panic reports accordingly. How do I go about debugging what is causing the panics?

I've since added a keepsyms=1 to the bootarg for the next time however meanwhile is there anyway to troubleshoot whatever reports I've got to see what the issue is?

I'm hoping it's not a hardware fault 'cos the iMac Pro's gonna be expensive to repair.

TIA

 

[AnakChan]

Bump to this. Can anyone assist in giving some guidance on how to debug/interpret the panic report?

 

[matram]

This is a result of a VERIFY statement in the internet driver that checks the length of the sent information against the length of the file being sent. The exception happens because you are trying to send past the end of the file. This code is actually open source so you can download the c file from Apple and check yourself.

As to the root cause and how to debug I have no idea.

 

[AnakChan]

Thanks, that at least sounds more like software/os bug than any kinda hardware issue. If so that's good news as I was dreading the thought of having to pay for the repair an iMac Pro.

Does Catalina generate any coredumps or just only such panic reports?

 

[matram]

I believe the standard way to debug the kernel is to use a second machine. I do think there is a way to generate a kernel core dump but that has to be enabled. These techniques are intended for kernel developers, as a user you should not have to deal with the kernel, I am not sure you even can.

As this deals with a very basic aspect of the OS - sending a file over the internet - it is unlikely that there is a bug directly in this driver. It would have impacted many more people.

I can suggest that to try to reproduce the exact circumstances under which this is happening, are you sending a specific file that is causing problems?

Then I would try to eliminate any other kernel extensions (kext) installed by 3rd party SW. Try running in safe mode or uninstall any SW you installed just before the problems started to narrow it down. Especially SW dealing with network communication.

Of course you should also report to Apple. We are far beyond what anyone on this forum can help you with.

 

[AnakChan]

Cheers. 17 yrs back I used to work with a Linux engineer who would debug kernel dumps (I was on the operations deploy and support side), but I'm not too familiar with the MacOS side.

Unfortunately the crashes are at random but I was doing file transfer operations over the internet each time it crashed, but I can't replicate it.

I've got quite a few 3rd party kexts installed and probably too many to uninstall - unless to do a fresh OS install and reinstall one by one. As these crashes have been happening for quite a few months now I've probably forgotten what I installed back then .

Looks like there's little I can do for what I can do now until the next crash. At least I have keepsyms=1 now so hopefully will get more info if it panics again.

Appreciate your guidance here, @matram!