MP 7,1 PSA: macOS Catalina 10.15.6 does not fix PCI-related sleep crashes

[Theophilos]

Hello,

After installing the 10.15.6 combo update and testing whether my Mac Pro with two Sonnet m.2 4x4 trays in Slots 5 and 6 would sleep normally, I can confirm that the system still crashes when sleeping. The fix for this issue remains to put both cards on Pool A as recommended by OWC.

It's disappointing Apple hasn't addressed this problem, which has been around since the beginning of the new Mac Pro. We've had at least 4 MacOS updates with no fix.

These are the issues addressed in MacOS 10.15.6:

Apple News

• Local news in your Today feed provides extensive coverage of San Francisco, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York City
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This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements.

• Adds a new option to optimize video streaming on HDR-compatible Mac notebooks for improved battery life
• Fixes an issue where the computer name may change after installing a software update
• Resolves an issue where certain USB mouse and trackpads may lose connection

 

[LeonPro]

Thats' disappointing to hear. I suppose this also doesn't address the users that selected the Radeon W5700X which also crashes the system when it sleeps.

 

[Schismz]

Bummer... I guess the overall question is: can Apple fix this issue even if they wanted to, or is it something that affects all systems with a T2 chip? Because the kernel panics are not exclusively a Mac Pro problem, if you look at other threads on this forum it happens for seemingly everything with the T2 and it used to happen on an iMac Pro I dumped as well (which from my recollection was Apple's first use of T2).

The OWC article on how to allocate storage to pool A or B was exceptionally well written/detailed, they did a great job with that, but it seems a lot like dancing through a minefield, which will eventually get resolved by Apple just moving everything to ARM and releasing a T3, or whatever they decide to do with ARM Macs.

For me personally what has had 100% efficacy is just disabling all power-saving features and never letting workstation sleep. It's brute-force, it's not super-elegant, it wastes energy, blah blah blah, etc, but... it works, so there's that.

BTW, running Mac Pro 2019, every slot filled except for #4, etc, etc, etc, I haven't edited my sig in 8+ years and wrote it when I thought the upgrade cycle of MP was becoming silly -- and the update from 4,1 to 5,1 pretty minuscule -- without realizing it would take a decade to release another Cheesegrater ;-)