Sunday, May 17, 2015

Yosemite 10.10.3 and Kernel Panics to Black Screen Freeze - Updated

The symptom is that, after installing Yosemite 10.10.3, this late-2013 iMac crashes to a black screen and requires an SMC reset before it can restart.  This is sometimes known as a kernel panic but typically with a kernel panic the system will restart and there will be a diagnostic and that gets sent to Apple.  This one doesn't leave much.


Things known for sure:


Kill Flash in Safari.  The Webkit loops you've been seeing will likely stop.

This you need to do regardless of 10.10.3 but it was optional previously whereas 10.10.3 makes removing it almost mandatory.  The consequence is you will lose video capability on tabloids and, generally, second-rate sites of any kind.  However, know that BBC uses it too.  Whether it's a tabloid yet is your call.


Kill Safari caches and not from within Safari by purging cookies, Web data, etc.  Locate the following file and drag it to the trash.  Then start Safari.

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari

Note:  passwords for Web sites and other such things may disappear if you have not also stored them in the Keychain.


Notes in general:

Connected peripherals do not seem to make any difference as the iMac crashes regardless of which peripherals are connected.

There was some concern about WD SmartWare and a Western Digital drive sleeping but it's irrelevant because it doesn't make any difference if the drive is on-line or off-line.


It's been some hours after making the above changes.  The console is no longer being flooded with the following error message:

5/17/15 12:33:36.306 nsurlstoraged[285]: Error: stepSQLStatement:toCompletionWithRetry - stepping returned unhandled result=11, DB=/Users/alanfraser/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db

There was at least a hundred of them and they come up every 7-8 seconds.   After dragging the com.apple.Safari folder to the trash, they stopped.  It's now several hours later and the iMac has not crashed again although it had crashed at least half a dozen times today before I did it.  The evidence is still circumstantial but the effects are good and observation continues.



Update:

It crashed again.  This was in the console log just before it went black.

5/17/15 21:17:25.127 com.apple.iCloudHelper[1031]: objc[1031]: Class FALogging is implemented in both /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FamilyCircle.framework/Versions/A/FamilyCircle and /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FamilyNotification.framework/Versions/A/FamilyNotification. One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.
5/17/15 21:17:25.133 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent) The _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit key is not available on this platform.
5/17/15 21:17:41.828 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent) The _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit key is not available on this platform.


5/17/15 21:21:43.000 bootlog[0]: BOOT_TIME 1431915703 0

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