the keepmoving.company

storytelling starts here

Catalina 10.15.4 kernel panic on laptop, workaround working for me. Fingers crossed. WindowServer mystery.

—

by

mikeswelsh
in ,

Quick summary can be found on apple communities here.

I read up on various workarounds, my setup is dual monitor using a Kensington dual monitor dock.

My Catalina setup on my MacBook Pro 16inch 2019
This is my setup.

So I was being frustrated by random reboots when finished work and leaving laptop open. I have two screens and a Kensington Dock.

Kensington SD4700P Dual Video Dock

The dock is working as it is supposed to. I also eliminated it. Still had the same panics.

gfxCardStatus

gfx screen with discrete selected
This is a nice tool to choose/monitor GPU behavior

So in researching the bug I came upon this. gfxCardStatus. Simple way to choose discrete only. I tested a few different ways to see if I got panics or WindowServer mysterious panics. And have the following settings:

  • gfx set to discrete only.
  • Energy saving set to never and the below settings.
setting panel for energy saver.
setting panel for energy saver
  • My screen saver set to message with clock.
Message screen saver with clock with a start time of 20mins
Message screen saver with clock with a start time of 20mins
  • My uptime since these changes: 6 days +
^ Note the uptime here at the bottom
^ Note the uptime here at the bottom
  • Video memory usage chart over the last 7 days: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M
Video memory usage chart over the last 7 days: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M
Video memory usage chart over the last 7 days: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M
  • This is the Past 30 days, note the super high usage spikes this also roughly corresponds to the ‘random’ reboots:
The WindowServer process is continuing to run at or near the top. But thankfully for now there have been no random reboots. When the screen saver comes on it no longer crashes, when I run a random video downloaded from pexels, no crashes.
This is the Past 30 days, note the super high usage spikes this also roughly corresponds to the ‘random’ reboots
  • The WindowServer process is continuing to run at or near the top. But thankfully for now there have been no random reboots. When the screen saver comes on it no longer crashes, when I run a random video downloaded from pexels, no crashes.

We shall see what happens over the next week. Ill update this post just to keep track of my ongoing saga or until Apple updates the OS.

Hope this helps someone avoid the random reboots and kernel panics

UPDATE: Crashed today 5/14 after 6.5days of uptime while using the Spotlight search. More on this later.

UPDATE: 5/25 Crashed again more than 4 days of uptime, and daily use all week. I was reconnecting a usb camera, then crash. The same kernel panic message with watchdog and WindowServer in the detail.