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iTunes/Quicktime crashing issue w/ 4870 & 10.5.7

R

red9

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 4, 2008
34
0
I appear to be having an identical issue to someone else who posted the following in the "race to dump the 4870 rom" thread, which I will quote below:

v0n said:
I'm actually having small, odd problem since update to 10.5.7 - whenever monitor goes to sleep, any open application application using QE/CI - be it iTunes or Quicktime - crashes with
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at /insert random address/

Happens on both of my patched ROM'ed 4780's. Can be tested ad infinitum by opening quicktime, playing few seconds of any video, pausing it, then setting "Put monitor to sleep" to 1 minute in Energy Saver and waiting one minute. As soon as my monitor is fully off and I wake it up I get crash report.
Click to expand...

I have the official Radeon 4870 from Apple with no modifications made to it or to my system. v0n says the issue occurs with two separate flashed 4870s, so I'm unsure if it is a hardware issue.

The only difference between my crash log and v0n's is that mine says:
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at /random address/

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this issue? Any thoughts on troubleshooting it?

The only other issue I have that I have noticed is that I get this weird horizontal black line that appears approximately 1" below some application windows. Other than that, everything seems just fine. There are no anomalies in Windows and gaming performance seems fine, so I'm not sure it's a hardware issue (any way I would be able to test for sure?).

Thanks for any and all help!
 
My iTunes kept crashing along with the cursor stuttering and jumping about. It would do it every time I brought the Mac out of sleep, sometimes multiple times when I tried to relaunch it. I too was getting a EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) from every crash.

Since I swapped the second monitor over from a straight DVI connection to DVI-VGA, iTunes has behaved itself and the stuttering mouse problem has gone away. There's a very bad bug with the 4870 and Apple need to sort it out asap as these posts seem to be rapidly increasing.

How do you have your monitor(s) connected?

:apple:
 
I have had exactly the same issue: using 4870 and updated to 10.5.7, iTunes crashes with the above reported error. Also, concurrently with the upgrade to 10.5.7 and the installation of the video card (which I did at the same time), I also had two ram chips fail. I suspect that this was just coincidence but it would be interesting to hear if anybody else faced a similar issue.

Regarding the crashing of iTunes and Quicktime, does anybody know if this is hardware related or software related?
 
Something similar happens with my flashed 4870, but I guess now I can confirm that it isn't because it's a flashed card. Thanks for reassuring me, I guess.
 
-SD- said:
How do you have your monitor(s) connected?
Click to expand...

Just a standard 24" connected via DVI, nothing else.

pchesler said:
...Regarding the crashing of iTunes and Quicktime, does anybody know if this is hardware related or software related?
Click to expand...

I'm going to assume it's a software/driver issue. The card works perfectly in Windows and appears to be working flawlessly in OS X too other than the itunes/quicktime crashing issue (I had that one-time so far issue with a horizontal black line below application windows, but that hasn't come back after a reboot). My workaround has been to disable monitor sleeping and just turning off my monitor when I anticipate leaving it for extended periods of time, annoying yes, but it's the only thing I CAN do.

I was excited and hopeful that the itunes/quicktime update yesterday to 8.2 would fix the issue, however it has done nothing to address it and it is still prevalent after updating.

I guess the real question is why is it only happening on some of our systems while others are unaffected? I literally have nothing special installed other than the 4870, some extra ram from OWC, and 4 hard drives in my bays. Anyone have any thoughts on how we can begin to figure out what the issue is and/or hopefully get enough attention to it so Apple fixes it? Thanks!
 
Seems to be a 4870 driver issue. Mine does the same.

I have on monitor connected dual-link DVI and one via DP->DVI adaptor.
 
Oooh, I have this issue too.

Apple have made things worse not better for my 3 month old Mac Pro.

Looks like I might make it to the new round of updates at this rate!

(3 months on and original problem not fixed, and 10.5.7 introduced new ones)

So all in all.

Not going well here at all on the Mac Pro side.

MacBook Pro from June 2007 working perfectly as always!
 
Anybody have a solution for this yet? It's beginning to drive me batty. :eek:

I'm also on a recent Mac Pro with the ATI card. After the displays go to sleep, iTunes will continue to play happily, but once I wiggle the mouse and see my desktop again, the music halts and I'm left with that irritating error message.

I can't be the only one... :confused:
 
I posted in the RTD 4870 thread about having this issue also, it was happening 100% of the time.

I took v0n's advice and just started switching my monitors off using the power button to stop the crash from happening.

Over the past few days though I have not been doing this and am yet to see a single crash.

I'm running a flashed XFX 4870 1GB on a 2008 2.8 with 2 displays connected via DVI.
 
Same specs as everyone else.

iTunes and Quicktime constantly crashing.
I only ever have screensaver turned on.

Even after a fresh restart I can still have them crashing randomly :(
 
And here's another iTunes update today to version 8.2.1 and the issue still remains :(

Hopefully it gets fixed in 10.5.8. Are you guys submitting the crash reports to Apple when you get them? Perhaps if enough people did that whenever it crashed to reiterate just how irritating the bug is it would get some attention (assuming it's not already planned on being fixed in 10.5.8). Here's hoping.
 
I don't have the problem.

2009 Mac Pro Quad 2.93 running 10.5.7 with BTO ATI 4870 and 24" LED Cinema Display connected to the mini display port connector.

A couple of months ago I did a clean install off of the Leopard install CD included with the MP to my SSD RAID0 array and then installed 10.5.7 when it came out.

I apply all software updates as they are available but I haven't otherwise changed, updated, or screwed around with drivers.
 
red9 said:
Are you guys submitting the crash reports to Apple when you get them? Perhaps if enough people did that whenever it crashed to reiterate just how irritating the bug is it would get some attention (assuming it's not already planned on being fixed in 10.5.8). Here's hoping.
Click to expand...

Yup, I most often do. Pretty annoying to jiggle the mouse only to find iTunes and QuickTime killed for no good reason. Argh.
 
VirtualRain said:
I don't have the problem.

2009 Mac Pro Quad 2.93 running 10.5.7 with BTO ATI 4870 and 24" LED Cinema Display connected to the mini display port connector.

A couple of months ago I did a clean install off of the Leopard install CD included with the MP to my SSD RAID0 array and then installed 10.5.7 when it came out.

I apply all software updates as they are available but I haven't otherwise changed, updated, or screwed around with drivers.
Click to expand...

My Mac Pro is brand new as of two (I think?) months ago... I have monitors on both the DVI and DP ports, and in the apple forums, people with either have also been having the issue.
 
Well... 10.5.8 is out and there's no word of a fix in Apple's release notes. Maybe it's something they snuck in. I haven't had a chance to test yet.
 
sigh, still happening with 10.5.8 :(

Are people w/ nVidia cards experiencing this issue too (either 3rd party or the stock one in the 2009 mac pros), or is this just a radeon 4870 issue?

Oh well, I guess it's back to turning off putting the monitor to sleep via energy saver and having to manually turn off my monitor.
 
The only slightly annoying bit about physically turning them off is it turns their USB off and on too.
 
thepawn said:
My Mac Pro is brand new as of two (I think?) months ago... I have monitors on both the DVI and DP ports, and in the apple forums, people with either have also been having the issue.
Click to expand...

I wonder if it's somehow related to using a monitor on a DVI port then. As I said, I only have a monitor connected to the MDP and do not have this issue. Anyone else here have a 24" LED ACD (only)?
 
VirtualRain said:
I wonder if it's somehow related to using a monitor on a DVI port then. As I said, I only have a monitor connected to the MDP and do not have this issue. Anyone else here have a 24" LED ACD (only)?
Click to expand...

On the apple support forums we've had every interation of port usage have it occur... I'm surprised you don't have it at all? You let your machine go screen saver then sleep displays and it doesn't ever crash?
 
thepawn said:
On the apple support forums we've had every interation of port usage have it occur... I'm surprised you don't have it at all? You let your machine go screen saver then sleep displays and it doesn't ever crash?
Click to expand...

No, I tried a number of things to intentionally get it to crash after reading this thread and it's perfectly fine. Never had a single crash of iTunes.

The only other thing I can think of is that I run Spaces (x4) with iTunes assigned to space 2 or 3 (not 1). Perhaps assigning it to a virtual desktop like this makes a difference?
 
VirtualRain said:
No, I tried a number of things to intentionally get it to crash after reading this thread and it's perfectly fine. Never had a single crash of iTunes.

The only other thing I can think of is that I run Spaces (x4) with iTunes assigned to space 2 or 3 (not 1). Perhaps assigning it to a virtual desktop like this makes a difference?
Click to expand...

Hmmm, have the space that it is on as one of the views when you sleep it and see if it occurs, because the bug involves something that both iTunes (and quicktime) use on redrawing their window when you wake up. It won't crash if its miniaturized to the dock either.
 
thepawn said:
Hmmm, have the space that it is on as one of the views when you sleep it and see if it occurs, because the bug involves something that both iTunes (and quicktime) use on redrawing their window when you wake up. It won't crash if its miniaturized to the dock either.
Click to expand...

Well I tried letting the screen saver come on and then the monitor went to sleep while iTunes had focus and was on screen... it didn't crash upon waking the monitor. Also tried setting the sleep to 1 minute (before the screen saver came on) and again it didn't crash. I just can't get my iTunes to crash.

What on earth could be different about my system? What sound output driver are you guys using? Perhaps it has something to do with the combo of video and audio drivers being used? I'm using a USB interface (Lexicon) connected to one of the USB ports on the back of the Mac Pro. :confused:

FWIW, this is all I could find in the system info about anything related to an ATI driver... if you want any other info from my system, let me know.
 

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