Some Macs fail after upgrading to macOS Catalina 10.15.4

THE macOS Catalina 10.15.4, available for two weeks, definitely not the smoothest update ever released by Apple: we’re already talking about a problem here (also present in iOS 13.4) that prevents the new system from making FaceTime calls with old iPhones and iPads. Now, one more flaw is surfacing.

Users on the SoftRAID and MacRumors have reported, over the past few days, cases of unexpected failures, crashes and closings on your newly upgraded Macs for macOS Catalina 10.15.4. Cases occur periodically and do not appear to affect all users, but they appear more frequently in two situations: when Macs are in sleep mode. rest or when they are performing transfers large volumes of files.

One of the affected users reported two unexpected crashes in two days: the first unexpectedly closed Adobe Creative Cloud after opening the lid of his MacBook Pro (2019 model) that was not in hibernation or anything like that, just at rest; the second caused the computer to restart upon waking from sleep, for no apparent reason. The Mac in question, according to the user, had never failed before the update.

The SoftRAID team posted a message on their own forum confirming the problem:

10.15.4 has a serious problem.

It appears in several scenarios, even on Apple disks, but it is more common to appear when there are several IO processes (input and output) happening at the same time. We think that a problem of threading. Therefore, even if SoftRAID volumes are affected more strongly (it is difficult to copy more than 30GB of data at once), all systems are affected by this.

In our bug report for Apple, we use a method to reproduce the problem ONLY with volumes formatted by Apple. It takes longer to reproduce, but the company is more likely to repair more quickly so as not to affect its larger user base.

So this: Apple is already aware of the problem and, if all goes well, release a patch to fix it as soon as possible. In the meantime, should you encounter the failure, it is best to avoid transferring a large amount of data at the same time and, who knows, shutting down your Mac every time you leave it aside for more than some minutes.

Has anyone ever noticed something like that? Leave your experiences below.

via MacRumors