MacBook Pro 16" - Fans and Abrupt System Halt while using VirtualBox

[eyalben]

So I just received a new MacBook Pro 16" (2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 64GB Ram).

Had few hours with it and.... oh my... be aware that there many issues (hopefully software).

- Yes, the fans kicks in all the time, even while booting the machine
- Already had two abrupt system halt (screen goes blank, machine halts completely).

10.15.2 Update - Abrupt System Halt
So I didn't realised that 10.15.2 is a fresh update...
During the update I got an nice System Halt... it took me few minutes to realise my machine got turned off in the middle.
Luckily turning it on got it back.

Then I tried to install VirtualBox... things got worse.

First Try - Abrupt Halt
1. Started a new Guest Machine with Ubuntu ISO mounted
2. Tried to get it to capture the keyboard
3. Everything froze - fans kicked in to maximum for a second - and boom, another abrupt system shut down.

So I turned it on again to give it another try....

Second Try - Fans are getting crazy
1. Started the guest machine
2. Got to the nice 'Welcome' view of Ubuntu Installation
3. Do Nothing
4. Literally - The guest machine is doing nothing, not even installing... just being idle on this view.

- Again, Fans kicks in to maximum


My previous model had 2 keyboard replacements and GPU issues
I was so happy to get this new model...
Why can't they make things that just work?


Anyone else had similar experiences?

 

[pshifrin]

Did you get any crash error messages on the reboot? i.e. "Your computer was restarted because of a problem?"

 

[eyalben]

Did you get any crash error messages on the reboot? i.e. "Your computer was restarted because of a problem?"

Yes I did, also sent it to Apple (at least.. clicked the button that do that).

 

[pshifrin]

Yes I did, also sent it to Apple (at least.. clicked the button that do that).

Did you click more details or whatever the more info button says? It should give a specific error.

 

[eyalben]

Did you click more details or whatever the more info button says? It should give a specific error.

There was no 'More Details' button, just 'Report...' button.
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Ok, I was able to recover some 'panic' log from the disk from the VirtualBox incident.

It looks like a crash happend while the kernel was from a VirtualBox kernel extension.

" Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv(6.0.14)[53BAF3B2-AB27-321B-9DF8-7A1395C58923]@0xffffff7fa0cbf000->0xffffff7fa0daefff
"

Hopefully this really is a software issue and not an hardware one.

 

[apb87]

this happened to me as well, multiple times. just going to hold off for an update of either virtual box or macos. i was creating a windows 10 vm

 

[Psyclism]

Maybe try Parallels or VMWare Fusion? If you use VM's frequently, either is worth the price of admission. I've never had good luck with VirtualBox on any VM I've tried to create or run with it. Just fired up an Ubuntu VM using Parallels tonight and it runs just fine in Catalina.

 

[sat24]

Maybe try Parallels or VMWare Fusion? If you use VM's frequently, either is worth the price of admission. I've never had good luck with VirtualBox on any VM I've tried to create or run with it. Just fired up an Ubuntu VM using Parallels tonight and it runs just fine in Catalina.

Parallels 15 is having trouble on Catalina when guest OS is also Catalina...

 

[eyalben]

I had a terrible experience with VMWare Fusion, their update cycle is extremely slow and they usually don’t fix bugs.

At my previous workplace we had Fusion crashing the USB Hub kernel extension when waking up from sleep (that means, no keyboard or trackpad).

Entire department had the same issue! eventually we had to develop a watchdog to reload the kext since VMWare never bothered to fix it.

I still hope Apple is planning to fix the fan issue, either these fans are extremely noisy, or they kick in way too fast.