[Sticky] Big Sur on M1 machines and SoftRAID issues

@mountainman

the web site is being updated.

there is a new beta in testing for release very soon. A lot of the changes made are not making it into the beta, but that does not mean progress is lacking. We are working on the user interface code currently, so it will probably go in all at once.

When I got my M1 Mac mini a couple months ago, since it was such a new system, I was thinking of using it as a test platform to see how it worked with all my existing hardware and software. My main development system is a Mac Pro (late 2013) and I use that for day to day work. When I wanted to test things out on the M1, I would shut down my Mac Pro, make the needed connections to the M1, then boot it up. Of course there were problems with both the hardware and software, but I'm slowly working out the kinks.

I've had to update many of the software apps on my M1. The web development app I use needed many updates over the last couple of months to correct M1 related issues, but is now starting to work pretty well. Just yesterday, I updated the driver to my Epson scanner and it's now working. With the b48 driver, my external Thunderbolt drives seem to work pretty well now with Softraid. I'm still having some issues with USB based drives. Because of the Apple driver issues with 11.2 and the Softraid driver, I'm still on 11.1. Hopefully, 11.3 will be out soon to correct this.

With all the major changes Apple has made in Big Sur and the M1, I can appreciate the issues SoftRAID Support has run into and it sounds like they are making good progress on getting them resolved. I can remember when Mac moved from PowerPC to Intel years ago and I think it took quite a while to get things (HW/SW) working right after that transition.

Sorry to hear of the problems @ironpig has run into with his storage devices. Hope he's able to work things out soon and complete his projects.

pruthe

It's getting really difficult to keep having this issues.

Just connected my RAID device and in about 15 sec got panic crash and reboot. After rebooting my Air went into weird state - no keyboard, no internet connection, spinning color wheel and required force reboot to get back to its senses.

I'm obviously still with 11.1

Crash report attached.

I do not see anything about SoftRAID in the backtrace and the SoftRAID driver tries to put itself in the backtrace whenever even a disk controlled by SoftRAID is involved in a panic.

Is the DriveDx SAT driver M1 compatible? Its possible the system hung from a SMART query?

I searched the Apple discussions forums and did not see this error whatsoever (searched for primariliy ("Unexpected abort while on interrupt stack")

@softraid-support

They do have dedicated M1 driver and it was fine before.

If my RAID is not connected then it's very stable. I was running it for 9 days strait with different devices connected/disconnected, but not RAID.

Perhaps it's a DriveDX and RAID combination, but without RAID DriveDX doesn't cause any problem.

I can try to remove DriveDX driver if you tell me how and see if there any difference and it might be useful (probably I'm not the only one using it :)

Thank you!

Sure. I do not think DriveDx is M1 compatible. The SAT driver in particular, probably is not compatible with M1.

remove the SAT driver by this set of terminal commands:

    sudo rm -r /Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
    sudo rm -r /Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin

Then run these two:

sudo kmutil clear-staging

followed by:

sudo kextcache -i /

restart.

Thank you @softraid-support!

I did it and now running duplicate finder on my 13TB RAID to see what happens )

Binaryfruit (DriveDX) claims that they do have M1 driver.

Here:

https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx/kb#external-drive-support-macos-11-arm

I liked their SW and already paid for it. Any possibility that their driver and your SW Raid driver are not friends? I was running it with DriveDX driver without RAID connected with no issues.

Good, I did not see it on theor support page.

What I was wondering was less about DriveDx, more the USB drivers (SAT SMART driver)

the DriveDx app is good, and while it exposes more technical information that most users want to see, is very useful for advanced users.

The concern was for the USB driver. Lets see if you have the same problem come up without it. I do not think there is a conflict between the DriveDx USB SMART driver and SoftRAID, but could be an issue with the M1 and the driver.

Please report back!

@softraid-support

Didn't help :(

Crash and reboot.

Attached

At least more data. This is a different crash, however, for whatever that is worth.

This is not an APFS encrypted volume is it?

Are you willing to try getting a core dump? It requires disabling SIP and setting an NVRAM setting. Then waiting for a crash and generating a core dump.

@softraid-support

I recently enabled FileVault on Macintosh HD. It's true

On your startup volume does not matter. But did you create a SoftRAID APFS volume, then erase it as encrypted in Disk Utility?

I ask, as a known kernel bug can cause crashing. We have reported this (and it is why we do not yet offer encryption in the beta), but it is not fixed yet.

I do not think you did, but need to ask. Its unlikely a startup encrypted volume could be causing this.

@softraid-support

I definitely didn't. It's a regular HFS+ volume.

Can you try to get a "core dump"?

What this means is a way to get a capture of all the backtraces in the kernel panic that you are seeing.

Startup into internet recovery mode by shutting down.
Hit the power button, then hold it down until you see the options window.
Click options, then continue
Next screen click your startup volume.
Next screen again and enter your password
The macOS recovery screen, go to the startup menu and run the "terminal.app"
Enter:
csrutil disable
It may give you a list of systems if you have more than 1.
If so, select it, then enter y for yes in the next prompt
enter password again
2. Set NVRAM to capture the dump:
run the terminal.app in normal mode.
Paste this command in:
sudo nvram boot-args="debug=0x8c4e"
restart.
3. Next time you panic, or hang, hold on to the power button for 1 second (only).
If the machine restarted from the crash, do this immediately after restart.
4. Wait ten minutes, then use "go to folder" to go here:
/private/var/tmp/kernel_panics

There should be a file. Let me know if it is there, I can tell you how to send it to me. (it will be quite large)