It is not gonna hurt to place some punctuation. At least at the end of the post.
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MP 1,1-5,1 Mac OS 11.3 has broken support for older Mac Pros
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Hey, he capitalized! What do you want?
I must be an extremist ... was going to ask for a paragraph.
I have a question which I have not understood from going thru this thread.
Is this is a chicken and egg scenario? The NVRAM can get corrupted from crashes/panics on boot up--- and a corrupted NVRAM will cause problems booting?
If one's NVRAM volume is already compromised or in a weird state.. one will continue to have issues?
I feel lucky so far, 11.4 works well for me, and I haven't had an issue rebooting. (Cold reboots). [Knock on wood]
tsialex was gracious enough to look at my 5,1's bootroom and he says it seems fine so far.
Is this is a chicken and egg scenario? The NVRAM can get corrupted from crashes/panics on boot up--- and a corrupted NVRAM will cause problems booting?
If one's NVRAM volume is already compromised or in a weird state.. one will continue to have issues?
I feel lucky so far, 11.4 works well for me, and I haven't had an issue rebooting. (Cold reboots). [Knock on wood]
tsialex was gracious enough to look at my 5,1's bootroom and he says it seems fine so far.
It may cause all sorts of problems. If the cells of the chip are exhausted by multiple writes/deletes the garbage collection may fail which may lead to an unbootable system. This particular problem is not caused by NVRAM directly as it happens with healthy NVRAM cell too. It looks like sometimes the boot process fails to enumerate the devices in a timely manner and it hangs on boot. I wonder if remapping the SSD, NVMe, USB (through) SSDT similar to iMac or MacPro7,1 may help in this case?
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With regards to nvram issues and repeated failures to boot 11.3/11.4. Is it the panic log being written to nvram that causes the issue? both with corruption and worn out nand cells.
I see that "nvram_paniclog" is a valid boot argument. It default is is to write panic logs to nvram. However it can be disabled by adding the bootarg nvram_paniclog=0.
I see that "nvram_paniclog" is a valid boot argument. It default is is to write panic logs to nvram. However it can be disabled by adding the bootarg nvram_paniclog=0.
I think nvram is not the issue. Neither Boot Rom version. I tested and reported in this thread a 2010 Firmware plus a prestine, empty nvram stream. Nothing changed the issue.
also I run about 20 boots in a row dumping and analyzing the nvram with my own tool after each reboot. Was
going thru a working nvram Garbage Collection. Also in this thread.
forums.macrumors.com
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I started with a rebuilt Firmware with empty NVRam streams and latest Bootloader.
I do a firmware rebuilt with every Mac Pro I am working on.
@tsialex is the mastermind in firmware and all credits go to him for his findings and for his support. Without him answering my questions I had never been in touch so deep with this firmware thing.
also I run about 20 boots in a row dumping and analyzing the nvram with my own tool after each reboot. Was
going thru a working nvram Garbage Collection. Also in this thread.
Mac OS 11.3 has broken support for older Mac Pros
I ran the tests again, this time I took care to set Startup Disk from the prefpane to the Big Sur 11.3 Disk. I restarted more than 20 times, this time logging the nvram free space thru a complete nvram circle (from filled to full to garbage collection to the same filled situation) and it...
forums.macrumors.com
Mac OS 11.3 has broken support for older Mac Pros
for general reference here is a working boot / dump / analyze circle what run thru a garbage collection. #525 I dumped after every boot und did a basic anaylizing with my little dumper / analyze tool. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/gohk7sm6syzeatp/Macschrauber's CMP Rom Dump.zip?dl=0) this was a...
forums.macrumors.com
I started with a rebuilt Firmware with empty NVRam streams and latest Bootloader.
I do a firmware rebuilt with every Mac Pro I am working on.
@tsialex is the mastermind in firmware and all credits go to him for his findings and for his support. Without him answering my questions I had never been in touch so deep with this firmware thing.
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It's not the full crash that is written to the NVRAM, but the number and name/path of it on the disk in a NVRAM variable named PanicInfoLog. Since you can't access the root device, the kernel is crashing before or right at the IOFindBSDRoot, no crash log is being saved to the disk and the PanicInfoLog is not being saved.
Please note that this is the behaviour on my test Mac Pro, other people could have different results since some are crashing later.
Won't affect our issue here. What is changing inside the NVRAM during POST will continue to happen.
The opencore page indicates an update:
OcAppleKernelLib: Fixed SetApfsTrimTimeout on macOS 12
Could this be good news for 5,1 cMPs?
OcAppleKernelLib: Fixed SetApfsTrimTimeout on macOS 12
Could this be good news for 5,1 cMPs?
I got success running Monterey with exiting the race condition by booting into single user mode, wait a few seconds and continuing (Typing exit).
maybe worth a try
maybe worth a try
Is it possible to boot into single user mode with OpenCore (OCLP for me) and see the text without a Mac GPU (no Bootscreen without OC)?
Once booted into single user more, typing exit will continue booting into desktop but I only have a black screen. I have to restart my mac, which I do via iphone-vnc to avoid hard booting.
when you see the bootscreen with OC then single user mode should work.
Simply as that: if you see text in verbose mode, single user mode should be ok, also.
@Muckd, same here. I never unplug the cord from the Mac since Big Sur 11.3, 11.4 and I installed macOS Beta 12.0 with no problem at all. Once, I unplugged the AC cord to probe/test otherwise. I boot twice, from that test. After, I never unplug the power cord. I have a 2 of the Mac Pro 4,1, one is dual CPU tray with the Gigabyte Titan Ridge TB3, slot 3 (NVME card), MSI AMD Radeon 8gB, the other with single CPU tray, AMD Radeon 7950, both on OC 0.6.9.
Right, never ever unplug the plug... You must also let the electrical company not to do any maintenance around your house nor any blackouts. Then your Mac will be OK.
I
I Am getting tired of posts claiming everything is ok so long they don't unplug their machine. How are such posts productive to the discussion? Are they bringing any value here or just increase the noise?
Agreed. That's why I asked. Good joke. I think people are trying to help but I'm not sure how helpful the information is.
Of course, statistically that would happen. But I haven't had any issues ? describe by others like 20x boots or more on Big Sur until of course until Apple shuts us down.
@albert-e -- Just for clarification purposes, you do have the issue. And like you, any other cMP user running 11.3+ on a 4,1/5,1 has the issue. -- and that is regardless of any trick you might feel/think is allowing you to have a normal/stable system.
I am running 11.2.3 and can boot 100 times if I want to (or at least until my SPI allows me to). But I can't get 10 successful boots in a row with 11.3+. The best outcome so far has been 22 boots -- all of these tests extensively documented by now on this thread. We all know that once cMP boots successfully into 11.3/11.4, everything seems to work fine (i.e. the system is stable). And yes, if you just use sleep mode and never intentionally boot again, you (potentially) have a functional system but only until you need to reboot for whatever reason. The risk to what can happen to multiple failed boots/kernel panics/etc has been extensively explained in multiple posts throughout this thread. Just be aware of those risks and plan accordingly. Good luck.
We actually don't know what the cause of the problem is and hence have no way of determining a solution apart from guesswork. What would an Apple (macOS) engineer do to find the cause? What information and tools do they have which aren't readily available? Anyone got an Apple engineer friend!
Apple has hardware and software debugging tools inaccessible to us - for example, we don't have access to console debugging tools like they have. I personally never read any detail about the BIG FRANK/LITTLE FRANK interfaces, just very generic descriptions, or even the Mac Pro circuit schematic was ever leaked - a circuit that was set in stone in the second semester of 2008, almost 13 years ago.
Btw, even if was real that everyone have an Apple engineer friend, how much of the 150k Apple employees are really kernel engineers?
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