I want to reiterate that Kernel Panics are OS problems. We are one of many electron apps who is suffering from this. Apple should look into this.

I also understand that from the user POV this is irrelevant information.

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Here to report a second KP today. Two things I noticed since a month ago when I experienced the first one:

  • Both times it happened with external monitors plugged, one of which is rather big.
  • Both times battery was running low.

I understood that Apple should provide a fix but they probably won’t, or only for the newest systems. Anyway, I agree - and thanks for sharing your point

Would you recommend to update Download | Node.js ?

I don’t know what Apple will do. I have no other recommendation other than to submit your crashes to Apple.

Third KP, just 5 days after. This time battery was full so I am discarding that. I’m beginning to work with only one screen and see what happens (though I see @mo-seph reported he had a crash with no external monitors attached).

I have sent all my crash reports to Apple. Is there really nothing else we can do to drive attention to this? I really don’t want my computer to be damaged at some point and will hate to give up Obsidian.

Maybe it’s fixed in Monterey? I am not sure Apple publishes detailed release notes for macOS…

The most useful hint so far for me is that it may have something to do with Obsidian after waking up from sleep mode. So I tend to kill obsidian and restart everytime I wake up the computer. (Which is not ideal, but it starts super fast, so not as bad as it might be…)

Actually I’m starting to suspect Citations as well. I was (still am) a pretty active user of Citation and kept it on all the time. I was having kernel panics very frequently. Sometimes I even got 2-3 per day. After I saw your post I turned off Citations and only turn it on when I have to use it, then turn it back off and restart Obsidian. Had no kernel panics for a couple of weeks (well, except for a couple times I forgot to turn off Citations…).

I do want to say that I love the Citations plugin and it’s not necessarily its fault, coz KPs don’t appear to happen to every users. Just saying that KPs on my machine may have something to do with some interactions with Citations. But this may not be the case for others, as KPs can be caused by many reasons.

Not to alarm you or anyone else, or to suggest that my particular experience is representative of anything other than my very particular workstation setup, but I hear you on not wanting to damage anything. I was at one point doing a lot of coding with customJS and Dataview, and when I started doing that I started seeing KP’s MUCH more frequently, at one point it felt like every other time I saved my scripts in customJS. And I tried a lot of things, going with external/without external monitor, quitting and re-opening after each script update and after waking my laptop from sleep, etc. Until one day I started having issues with my laptop performance overall. Finally, my Wi-Fi completely crapped out. I will probably never know if it was related to the KP’s, but nothing I did could bring my Wi-Fi back. In safe mode it worked, but even with Apple Support’s help, resetting PRAM, etc. etc., we couldn’t isolate the issue. Apple finally just advised something had become corrupted in my data somewhere, and that I should just reinstall everything from scratch. It was NOT a pleasant experience. After reinstalling everything, I stopped messing with customJS and Dataview for a while, and in fact I stopped using Obsidian much for a while. But I recently fired it up and started using it actively again, and I just had another KP today, which brought me back here.

This experience has shaken my faith in the stability of the app. I completely understand that plugins are used at your own risk, but so much of the value in Obsidian is in its extensibility that I wonder whether I would want to use it in its bare-bones default state. I’m hoping Monterey brings some relief, because as is, Obsidian is starting to feel like an app that is forever in beta. I hate saying this, because I absolutely love the community and am in awe of the developers. But at some point as a user you have to focus on your work and stop worrying about the stability of your app.

Fingers crossed.

Again, to reiterate, this neither a plugin problem nor an Obsidian problem. This is Apple’s problem.
All other electron apps that deal with files have these crashes on some Mac systems.

Point taken. Continuing to file crash reports with Apple.

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It has not happened for a long time now on 12.0.1. Is it fixed?

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I don’t know if we can blow the trumpets yet, but anecdotally it hasn’t happened to me for a long time now. Probably 2-3 months at least. I’m on macOS 12.0.1 now on an M1 Mac Mini.

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yeap. same here. im on macOS Monterey and i havent had anything happen to me in these recent builds. Extremely satisfied as of late

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Cautiously adding myself to this list. No KP since last time I reported. I am sticking to only one external monitor, updated to Monterrey. Hoping things stay this way.

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I’ve had a couple in the last few days - always on external monitor. It does generally seem better, though.

Hasn’t happened to me for the 1.5 month since I switched to a new MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip and MacOS Monterey. No KP whatsoever, with or without Citation plugin, with or without external monitor. Finger crossed!

Obsidian was just chilling in the background when the entire computer shut down and showed the kernel panic message.

Steps to reproduce

No idea. I opened Obsidian to check out the new live preview mode, then hopped on a Zoom meeting.

Expected result

Well, I expect my computer not to crash…

Actual result

I got a kernel panic. After several hours of the meeting (and running Obsidian in the background) everything just shut down. The crash reporter then mentioned Obsidian Helper in the report.

Environment

  • Operating system: macOS 10.15.7
  • Obsidian version: v0.13.14

Additional information

Full crash report: Obsidian v0.13.14 crash - Pastebin.com

I would never want to force you into getting macOS Monterey as a fix but i would like to make you aware that i have not gotten any panics while using macOS 12.0.1. It seems apple might have already addressed other issues that ended up just fixing this. i do however get occasional moments where obsidian stays frozen when i try fixing up my theme various times with constant saves or am loading up a lot of plugins and testing them (that is expected from me of course).

I did not see this happening on my MBP-M1 and MBA-M1. Not in macOS 11 or 12. So maybe good to use Big Sur or Monterey macOS while using Obsidian.