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Kernel Panics
- Thread starter BostonQuad
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I'm having a kernel panic every other day, this after a month of maybe only one or two.
The first issues happened when I added a bad drive in my firewire chain, so I played around with eliminating a few of my drives from the chain, which helped. I'm still reluctant to go beyond just two drives on that (along with my USB external SSD).
I still get an issue with YouTube in Safari, which crashed the system twice this week. Others have reported that issue, so I'm hoping that the next update takes care of some of that.
My m1 MPB hasn't had an uptime longer than 8 days since I got it, hoping it gets fixed in 11.3 or else I'l hound apple support. Its definitely apples hardware or software, I don't have anything weird installed and I've had a few panics on battery with zero peripherals.
Yes, it's 11.2.3. All of the kernel panics I've run into have been with 11.2.3.
My strategy of late has been to just not push the system much until they roll the next update out. It's sounds like some others have had a harder time of it. I've run diagnostics, First Aid, and killed an irrelevant process that I found in LaunchAgents, but I probably won't tinker any deeper so as to not complicate things.
It seems like macOS 11.3 resolved this problem for me. Use it for about a week.
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That sucks ! I'm still on 11.2.1, 76 days uptime and not a KP on my base M1 Air.
Lots of that is standby/sleep mode but still I've gotten plenty of use out of it too
I downloaded the public release yesterday and now I've had 24 hours of ZERO kernel panics or reboots on my M1 Mini. If it wasn't for a sudden corruption error on my external Time Machine (Firewire), I'd say that everything was going well. 😃
As I would go weeks between panics, it's too early for me to tell. But this sounds hopeful.
I feel like it solved it for me, too. I had had multiple panics a week for the last month or so, but none since updating to 11.3.
Absolutely, it got a point that I was afraid to do anything on my M!1 mini, but it's been about five days of zero panics. I've also noticed memory handling to be a bit better with 11.3 too. Now I can finally relax and enjoy using the machine again.
The M1 chips are all tested before they’re built in. All the kernels in macOS Big Sur have been rewritten for Apple Silicone, so why shouldn’t it be a software related issue? We should all expect more new bugs with this transition.
If it was purely software related, I'd expect more consistency. Most M1 owners appear to have had no trouble at all, while a few experience kernel panics regularly. If the latter group had some unusual use case, then it could easily be explained by software. But I have nothing unusual installed, and my panics have occurred while using the most routine of applications (Safari and Mac Mail).
If hardware has nothing to do with it, why have a few people experienced panics regularly, while most have not at all?
After six days, my machine had a panic reset while I wasn't using it, so I awoke to that today. Before the update, I was having three or four crash reports and at least one forced reboot a day. This is progress, but now I know that I'm not out of danger, and I'm starting to wonder whether it's worth contacting Apple.
I figured that it might be because of something outside the norm I was doing; I do have some firewire devices attached and I'm running a few programs like Yoink, Little Snitch, and Magnet that are popular but maybe not on everyone's machines. I got my machine refurbished from Apple, and smartmontools showed me then that there had been a lot of unsafe boots prior to my purchase. I'm not an expert in these sort of things, but I did note that.
Your M1 was refurbished? I didn't think they were available refurbished yet. Or did you mean something else attached to your M1?
They've been available from the Apple refurbished store for a couple months now. There's some great deals there when they are in stock! I certainly still recommend using it despite my issues with my current machine.
There were (are?) bugs in Bug Sur on the M1 that caused kernel panics. According to the SSD SMART monitoring tools, I’ve had 48 unsafe restarts on my M1 MBA since I bought it Nov 17, 2020. That’s a lot for a MacOS system. Probably more than I’ve had since OS X 10.0 Cheetah.
Sorry to hear that. I am not saying that there were (are?) not KPs in Big Sur, just saying that I never ever suffered one. At least so far.
Beware of SMART data, though. Have you actually experienced these 48 kernel panics? Sometimes these data is not entirely accurate.
Probably. I just had another crash today. They mostly occur now on shutdown or restart. Luckily those don’t happen often.
The SMART data is as correct as Apple makes it. Apple designed the NVMe SSD controller in the M1 SoC and wrote the software APIs used by the SMART tools. I’ve verified that the tools are correct by writing a very simple version of the SMART monitor command line tool. It uses Apple APIs exclusively and gets the same results as smartmontools command smartctl. You can get it here: smartTBW.pkg. If you want to look at the code, that is here: smartTBW code.
Oh, of course, it's you... I am a fan of that app of yours. Your user id is not easy to remember, though, sorry.
What I mean is, besides the fact that Apple supplies that data, are you totally certain that these counters match actual Kernel Panics? Sometimes the devil relies on interpretation of data, not the data itself. However, if you are confident that they are, then I believe you.
Any ideas of the culprit? Could they be third-party software related?
Some of my kernel panics appear to be about drive access randomly messing through my firewire adapter (it's a dongle, so I guess we are to expect some issues). My other issues happen randomly when watching videos in YouTube on Safari. That's not predictable either, but I've seen others complaining on here.
The number of kernel panics I've been getting have been reduced from about ten a week to only one or two with 11.3.1.
KPs watching videos in YouTube... hard to believe this is not hyper-ultra-super-tested. My point is that it is difficult for it to be the cause, I would call it a symptom. Otherwise we would have heard from thousands of KPs in similar scenarios. May I ask whether the Firewire dongle is connected while these YouTube KPs appear? Or any other not-so-common app running or hardware connected?
In any case I hope that 11.4 solves all of them.