MBP Kernel Panic seems related to Wacom driver

[snipper]

Hi,

For months, my 15' retina MacBook Pro 2013 / 11,2 or 11,3 suffered from kernel panics. The crash log consequently mentions 'Wacom driver' without the 'r', even without the Wacom tablet attached. Wacom drivers (both touch and pen) CPU usage spiked for minutes from 4 to abnormally high: 20, 30, 40% or more. Panics went from daily to hourly and a whole cloud of pixels got 'stuck', leading me to thing it was a hardware problem. But it's not. It's the software.

After all the usual PRAM and driver-de/re-installations etc, only a completely clean re-installation of macOS (10.14) made the kernel panics go away and even fixed the stuck pixels. I tested for weeks without any problems. Then I installed the Wacom driver and the daily kernel panics returned.

Wacom says they can't find the problem in my Wacom Center collected crash logs and it is 'only' in my MBP because they don't get others complaining about this. If you look on the Apple forums however, there are more cases.

Looking at the Wacom driver timeline, this bug must be in there since the December driver update. That's why I'm planning to test with a pre-december 2019 driver.

 

[snipper]

Update: Meanwhile, I've been using the newer driver for weeks. Although it crashed at least once a day while using Citrix for working at home, and although I still caught it 'redhanded' while using way too much CPU time, heating up the MPB at least once, it's more stable than before (second December driver version).

 

[HugoMe]

I seem to have the same problem on a new Imac 2019 under Catalina

 

[snipper]

For what it's worth: I've no longer had problems since ± July, using the latest versions of Wacom drivers and Mojave.

 

[HugoMe]

I confirm kernel panic traced to Wacom driver under Catalina. I had been using the latest driver which has now been pulled off from their site. Maybe I should go back one version.