Kernel Panic on macOS (crash, reboot)

Pch · February 25, 2021, 3:14pm

Thank you very much @Licat for taking the time to answer and clarify things a little bit.

Just to be clear, I really didn’t mean to blame anyone here, I was more thinking out loud.

I mentioned the trouble with the Obsidian Helper (Renderer) simply because it pin points directly Obsidian and as the no dev’ that I am, I just thought it could help a bit (nothing more).

As for your recommandations, I’ll continue to send the report to Apple if it happens again (so far, today, no crashes in sight and Obsidian has been open for quite some time now).

I’ve disabled the very last plugin I installed (the TOC plugin, which I’ve got through the settings in Obsidian) but left the others as until yesterday, I wasn’t really aware of this problem so I need to try and return to my “previous” settings of Obsidian and see if it happens again.
If it happens again, I’ll sadly disable everything and try to investigate further .

Things I forgot to mention thought :

I only have one very small vault of 32,6 Mo (130 elements) on iCloud (so far)
13 actives CSS snippets and I’ve used solely the default dark theme (for now)
7 active community plugins and a lot of core plugins

I never use the Graph view while working on my notes as it always seemed, to me, not very “ressources friendly”. I open it when I’m done, at the end of the day, to see my “progress”.

I’m a fairly new Obsidian user, and I really think I’ve finally found the right note taking app’ for me. So, I find those kernel panics really saddening .

I can only hope, I’ll be able to continue to use Obsidian like I did before and those crashes will “go away” . I’m not planning to abandon Obsidian anyway .

Quick question here though, just in case but how do you do that ?

WhiteNoise · February 25, 2021, 3:30pm

From the console: obsidian --disable-gpu or create a shortcut that runs obsidian with --disable-gpu.

This is not just an Obsidia issu if you search on github, you’ll find many other electron projects with the same issue.

Pch · February 25, 2021, 3:54pm

I’m really sorry if this is the feeling that came from my previous posts in this topic. I wasn’t trying to blame anyone but I may have not express it correctly.

I’ll definitively take a good look (this time) at the issues of Electron on GitHub though, see if I can find something useful there (who knows), or at least something that could help me to understand a little bit more where the problem might really come from .

Dully noted !
If I really need to, I’ll try it .

Thank you!

luckman212 · February 25, 2021, 4:16pm

Since this is about macOS, it might be helpful for some who don’t know how to run apps on Mac with commandline arguments.

Open Terminal.app
Copy & paste the line below:

/Applications/Obsidian.app/Contents/MacOS/Obsidian --disable-gpu

ryanjamurphy · February 25, 2021, 4:27pm

Wait. Have we thought about theme and appearance settings in this thread?

Since it’s possibly a GPU issue I wonder if there’s certain CSS that mucks with electron+macOS…

Pch · February 25, 2021, 6:45pm

@luckman212 : Thank you ! That’s pretty useful indeed as I never launched Obsidian from the terminal !

I use and always have used the .theme-dark “Base theme” (so far) with translucent window on off.

As far as the CSS snippets go, I’ve got a few, but they are pretty common ones.

Styling the block quotes in Preview
Faint text when checkboxes are checked (instead of strikethrough)
Changed the font everywhere (Edit & Preview) + one specific mono font for codes
Changed the font-size of the footnotes (and references)
Changed the “flashing” highlight color when clicking on footnote/back ref.
Full color changes on the graph view
Changed the color of the ==highlighted text== (Edit & Preview)
Reduced the indentation in lists
Relationship lines for lists (Edit & Preview)

And that’s pretty much it .

Concerning the community plugins I use :

Add links to current note
Convert Url to iFrame
Emoji toolbar
Icons
Sliding panes (rotated the note title the other way around)
Templater
Workbench

There was the very new TOC plugin, but I disabled it as I experienced a kernel panic while testing it (). The second kernel I run into yesterday was when trying to embed a TikTok video .

As for the core plugins everything is enabled except :

Random note
Audio recorder
Workspaces
Publish & Sync

Not sure if any of this could help, but I didn’t run into any kernel panics today !

ryanjamurphy · February 25, 2021, 6:49pm

Thanks for the thorough report. Hopefully we’ll discern a pattern sometime soon!

Pch · February 25, 2021, 7:29pm

This is all I’m hoping for too !
Thank you for trying @ryanjamurphy !

tim_hilde · February 26, 2021, 7:58am

Tried this yesterday evening, didn’t close obsidian over night and just had a crash and reboot.

I have a MacBook Air with M1 chip and I am on Obsidian v0.11 as well as MacOs 11.2.1. I use the Minimal theme, only a few snippets and a lot of plugins. I can share them if necessary.

bright · February 28, 2021, 1:36am

Had 4th crash again on macos same details as before.
plugins :

advanced table
daily planner

using vim keybindings.
I don’t use graph view.
Theme :

red graphite

hardware :

macos big sur version 11.2
processor - 2.3 GHz 8-core intel core i9
memory - 32 GB 2667 Mhz DDR4
Graphics AMD radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB

NOTE : no custom CSS snippets

just giving some information so it’s easier for dev to track down the issue.

from now on i am keeping obsidian bare bones with no plugins and stock theme. Will report again if there is another crash.

Pch · February 28, 2021, 2:14pm

Another one for me too here (2021-02-28 - 1:20 PM (UTC+1)).

Reported it to Apple (Just in case, I kept a copy of the report (same for the previous one too)) .

I didn’t have any yesterday (despite playing around with CSS Snippets and adding few plugins through Obsidian’s settings).

On the four kernel panics I encountered so far, 2 of them happened while adding external links to a note (between the copy of the link from Chrome but before being able to paste it in the note… in other words, while the link was still in my clipboard) :

When embedding the TikTok video (I was going to paste the link into an <iframe>)
And just now as I was formatting the markdown external link in my daily note ( []()) : It crashed while I was writing the text for the link [Foru] .

Each time I had just one single note open (solely in Edit mode).

No data loss so far and after reboot, Obsidian reopened exactly where it was left when the crash occured.
iCloud so far seems to be doing correctly its job .

As it’s the first time it happen in the past few days, I can say that :

I was able to add, update and or configure community plugins without crashes.
I’ve also been able to modify CSS snippets, test new ones (which I don’t use yet) and preview community themes without crashes, also.

But :

I didn’t do any “real” writings during those past few too (I’ve been in a procrastination phase ), until now (even though it wasn’t much : just a tasks list of 94 words per Obsidian - 754 characters).

As for the rest, my Mac didn’t change in between my last post and now.

macOS Big Sur Version 11.2.1

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
Processor 2,5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
Memory 16 Go 1600 MHz DDR3 
Graphics Intel Iris Pro 1536 Mo

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name:	MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:	MacBookPro11,2
  Processor Name:	Quad-Core Intel Core i7
  Processor Speed:	2,5 GHz
  Number of Processors:	1
  Total Number of Cores:	4
  L2 Cache (per Core):	256 Ko
  L3 Cache:	6 Mo
  Hyper-Threading Technology:	Enabled
  Memory:	16 Go
  System Firmware Version:	430.0.0.0.0
  SMC Version (system):	2.18f15

I’m still not using any community theme and to my previous list of my enabled community plugins :

Add links to current note
Convert Url to iFrame
Emoji toolbar
Icons
Sliding panes (rotated the note title the other way around )
Templater
Workbench

I’ve added :

Recent files
Vault Changelog

And also re-enabled the Table of Content plugin which was just updated today.

For the core plugins, nothing changed. Everything is enabled except :

Random note
Audio recorder
Workspaces
Publish & Sync

I’m not sure I can be more precise than this here .

Edit : Yes, I can add one thing :

Just in case, I’ve run a diagnostic on my Mac (to put aside some hardware problem, as it’s pretty old and used ) and it came back negative : there was nothing to see there, fortunately )

tim_hilde · March 1, 2021, 12:55pm

After starting Obsidian without gpu with this command

Terminal gives back this prompt quite often:

Obsidian Helper (Renderer)[1319:30798] CoreText note: Client requested name ".LucidaGrandeUI-Bold", it will get Times-Roman rather than the intended font. All system UI font access should be through proper APIs such as CTFontCreateUIFontForLanguage() or +[NSFont systemFontOfSize:].

Maybe this helps

Pch · March 1, 2021, 5:58pm

Another one (4:45 PM (UTC+1))

This time I was playing with a CSS snippet concerning the relationship lines in Preview Mode, specifically .

I was trying to render relationship lines with lists containing different types of list (Bulleted list + Numbered list).

This lead me to discover that my CSS snippet concerning the relationship lines in Preview mode, literally break the scrolling when having a note open in Edit and Preview (with linked panes) at the same time .

I didn’t notice it before because I tend to scroll, when using linked panes while re-reading myself, in the activated Preview pane (rarely with my cursor in the Edit Pane) but today, for once, the activated pane was the Edit one and it looked like this (with the snippet still enabled) :

First with the Edit pane activated (which doesn’t works, as the preview pane jumps) and then with the Preview pane activated (which works)

And when I disabled the CSS snippet for the relationship lines in Preview mode, the scrolling trouble disappeared :

Yesterday, I thought there could be a relation between the kernel panics and my clipboard, today, thinking further, it just could be this scrolling trouble : I was in a task list when I tried to copy/paste my external link into my note yesterday and even if I didn’t have the preview opened at that moment, maybe this small bits of code was asking too much to the Obsidian Helper (Renderer) ?

The CSS Snippet I used for my relationship lines comes from the Minimal Theme (and I have the same trouble of a jumping Preview pane when previewing the theme).

Well, I disabled the CSS Snippet for the relationship lines in Preview Mode ().

And as for the rest, it’s still the same except that there was an update of Big Sur so I’m now on macOS Big Sur Version 11.2.2.

thlin · March 2, 2021, 7:02am

I just met another kernel panic.

My Environment :

MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
macOS Big Sur 11.2.1
Obsidian 11.4

I turned off the graph view in the Core plugin last week, I have never met any Kernel panic in the last five days.

Unfortunately, it happened after I switched the theme from Minimal to Atom.
(In my own experience, the reboot usually happened in a few hours after I changed the theme. )

Just giving some information.
Thank you~

koala · March 2, 2021, 12:55pm

Did you have kernel panics with Minimal too?

tim_hilde · March 2, 2021, 2:29pm

I did at least

thlin · March 2, 2021, 2:48pm

In my case, I didn’t have the Kernel panics with “Minimal”.

Actually, I used the “Pisum” theme and never changed the theme in the past few days and it’s fine.

Today, I used the “Minimal” for 4~6 hours then switched to “Atom”. (But I tried several different themes when I was switching the theme)
After a few hours, the kernel panic happened.

WhiteNoise · March 2, 2021, 2:56pm

Don’t forget to send the reports to Apple.

Pch · March 2, 2021, 3:04pm

I don’t use any theme, just CSS snippets, and one of them was from the Minimal theme.

I thought it was breaking the Preview pane when scrolling through lists but I could reproduce this with other themes too while just previewing them…

There seem to be something wrong on that vault …

As I created a new vault today, I’m going to work on this new one and see what happens . Maybe It’ll help debug the vault in which I encountered Kernel panics .

Done, each time .

Is it useful to add a comment when sending the report ?
If yes, what should I say ?

WhiteNoise · March 2, 2021, 3:06pm

not much other than emphasize that it’s caused by an electron app.