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Ethosik

Contributor
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
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Just like with the release of Catalina on my 2019 i9 iMac getting kernel panics several times a day - which is 100% software since it NEVER happened after a later update and never occurred with Mojave. I am now getting these AGAIN with Big Sur. Beware of upgrading, I am getting the exact same kernel panics as I was getting before when it goes in sleep or my system is idle for some time. Watchdog causes the computer to restart. Actually this happened during the Big Sur install too.
 
I would start by un-installing that...

Its something on macOS itself. I don't have any anti-theft software.

Panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff8015d53a13): userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds
service: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (14810

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.driver.watchdog

 
Its not a problem other than macOS. I was in conversations with Apple Support when I was having issues with Catalina and Apple themselves confirmed that it was an issue and engineers were working on resolving it in a later update. Its related to the Vega GPU drivers in macOS.

Also, this happens on a clean install with NO SOFTWARE installed after the install.
 
I have a 2019 i9 iMac with the Pro Vega 48 GPU. I had been getting constant kernel panics with Catalina, usually when the machine was idle for a few minutes. The last two releases of Catalina seemed to solve the problem, and I didn't have any panics for a few months. Now with Big Sur, they are back with a vengeance. They seem to happen a lot more frequently when I have my two QHD monitors plugged in.
 
I have a 2019 i9 iMac with the Pro Vega 48 GPU. I had been getting constant kernel panics with Catalina, usually when the machine was idle for a few minutes. The last two releases of Catalina seemed to solve the problem, and I didn't have any panics for a few months. Now with Big Sur, they are back with a vengeance. They seem to happen a lot more frequently when I have my two QHD monitors plugged in.
This is my exact experience also. Only with multiple monitors plugged in. I use amphetamine app to prevent crashing.
 
I have the 2019 i9 iMac with Pro Vega 48 GPU as well. I haven't had any kernel panics in Catalina or Big Sur. I have 64gb of RAM, and use a 2012 iMac as a second display via Target Display Mode over thunderbolt. The old iMac is running High Sierra, which is the last version of MacOS that worked for me with Target Display Mode.

Perhaps the comparatively low resolution of the old iMac (2560x1440) is not enough to cause kernel panics. I do notice the memory utilization of the Pro Vega 48 GPU frequently hovers around 100% according to iStat Menus, but it seems to do that even without using a second display.
 
I have a 2019 i9 iMac with the Pro Vega 48 GPU. I had been getting constant kernel panics with Catalina, usually when the machine was idle for a few minutes. The last two releases of Catalina seemed to solve the problem, and I didn't have any panics for a few months. Now with Big Sur, they are back with a vengeance. They seem to happen a lot more frequently when I have my two QHD monitors plugged in.
Yep it, at least my scenario, was related to the Vega GPU drivers. Nothing you can do unless you can use an eGPU for a while until Apple updates Big Sur to fix it again.
 
I have my 2020 iMac since September, not a single kernel panic with Catalina.

After upgrading to Big Sur I had two panics within the last four weeks. One was probably related to Firefox using hardware acceleration. The other to the smb driver.

I have no 3rd party kernel extensions loaded and the RAM is from Apple. Can not say that I am happy...
 
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After several month without any issues I thought Apple might have fixed the issue, but no. Today again a kernel panic in smbfs...

Still not happy...
 
After the upgrade to Big Sur I was getting panics every few days. The new OS produced a lot of bugs which will take some time to fix.
 
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