[Sticky] Big Sur on M1 machines and SoftRAID issues

@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)

@softraid-support

I'll try and if I have questions I'll ask you.

As a side note looks like problems happen either at RAID connection to the running system or when I run some continuous extensive tasks like find duplicates in 13TB data.

Are you absolutely sure it's not a HW (RAID) related issue?

I can try to connect it to my old 2012 MBP running Catalina (what SW Raid I need to install) and can run it there for a while to see if there are any problems. Theoretically it should be able to run indefinitely there.

Just use SoftRAID 6 beta. Works fine on Catalina. And we are not working on the 5.x code any longer.

I do not know what is causing the panics, so anything could be involved. The idea of the core dump is gather some information on this.

Just installed 52. Again got the double reboot.... still weirding me out. But apart from that it works fine with 11.1. Still no Monitor though. Let's see if we get a new 11.3 beta tomorrow. Thanks for the work @softraid-support

You are welcome. ;-)

Sleep crash: Mini M1 16GB 11.1 Softraid 6.0.1 b52 Thunderbay RAID 5 with 4 5tb drives at Thunderbolt 2 (with Apple TB 3 > TB 2 adapter)

Finally decided to take the risk and move over to the new Mac Mini, but this seems to be a show stopper for me. When the Mac goes to sleep, the thunderbay follows suit and light turns from blue to amber. A few seconds later the light turns back to blue which appears to try to wake the Mac up. Then several seconds later the light goes back to amber. Then the Mac crashes and restarts. This happens every time and I can confirm that it doesn't matter whether or not "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" is checked.

I cannot leave these drives running 24/7. For several years I have allowed me iMac in my office to go to sleep and the drive turned amber and followed suit. This is a home office, not okay for drives to run 24/7.

Attached please find crash report and softraid report. I hope you can tell me this will be rectified, because if not it will have to be buy buy Softraid and buy buy Thunderbay for me. Appreciate your help.

The SoftRAID driver is not in the backtrace, so this is interesting. I may need a "Core dump".

Neither have I seen anything similar in my Mini or Apple laptop M1.

this is a Thunderbolt "1" enclosure, (based on the volume being created in 2014), which may not work with the M1 and adapter, however. In which case, Apple won''t give you support on it. Let me find one and try to test this.

I am also experiencing major slowdowns on the M1 Mini since I plugged in the Thunderbay 4. I had the software drivers installed for a couple of weeks before I tried to move the actual drive over. It was snappy as can be. First clue was after plugging the Thunderbay in, the MDS was running but got so bogged down I couldn't even move the mouse. I know it uses some power to do its thing but not like this. This is not normal even on a 10 year old Mac. I had to reboot. Running Black Magic speed tests shows extremely variable speeds from the low double digits to the 400-500 range. This is with either no apps open or Safari and a couple of static tabs (like this one). It seems to me that something is not right, not sure if it is the driver but that's the one thing that changed on this system once I plugged in the RAID drive to control. I know you are hard at work to fix all of this, but years ago when I thought I would never consider software RAID, this is the nightmare situation that I feared. I was happily proven wrong with the performance and reliability on the i7 Macs, but this situation makes it impossible for me to work on the new machine. I need a solution quickly and I fear that this will take months to get right. Can you give us some insight? I am ready to abandon all this stuff I bought. Help!

Please attach a SoftRAID Technical Support file.

There is nothing in the SoftRAID driver that can cause this, it is "passive" and simply points macOS what disks to perform IO on. The driver uses very little overhead. MDS is indexing generally. There is possibly a spot light issue, or something. If you delete the index and let it recreate, does the issue go away? (add the volume to "exemption", restart, then remove the exemption)

There is no disadvantage to software RAID along the lines that you describe.

In general, Software RAID is more flexible and just as fast as hardware RAID. One can debate which one prefers, but your experience is not one of the differences. I suspect it would happen or be happening on any hardware you own.

@softraid-support This is definitely a Thunderbolt 2 4-bay enclosure, full RAID version. I just checked my invoice which says "OWC ThunderBay 4 TB2 20.0TB w/SoftRAID". Let me know what you need and I will provide it.

@softraid-support Here is how it appears in the system profiler:

Thunderbolt Bus 1:

  Vendor Name: Apple Inc.

  Device Name: Mac mini

  UID: 0x05AC425BF59FC7D1

  Route String: 0

  Firmware Version: 0.0

  Domain UUID: 8F37857B-0AD7-4FFE-A726-74D29351A181

  Port:

  Status: Device connected

  Link Status: 0x0

  Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1

  Current Link Width: 0x2

  Receptacle: 1

ThunderBay 4:

  Vendor Name: Other World Computing

  Device Name: ThunderBay 4

  Vendor ID: 0x5A

  Device ID: 0xDE08

  Device Revision: 0x1

  UID: 0x005ADE0814901C10

  Route String: 1

  Firmware Version: 24.2

  Port (Upstream):

  Status: Device connected

  Link Status: 0x2

  Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1

  Current Link Width: 0x2

  Cable Firmware Version: 0.1.18 / 0.0.0

  Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.14.0

  Port:

  Status: No device connected

  Link Status: 0x7

  Speed: Up to 20 Gb/s x1

  Current Link Width: 0x1

  Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.14.0

This is a pretty vanilla set up. I clean installed even my user account on this M1. So there really shouldn't be anything quirky going on compared to others.

@softraid-support Another clue: If I use the Softraid utility to Volume > Unmount first, before going to sleep, operation is normal. No crash. Then after wake, Volume > Mount resumes normal operation of the disk. So the problem is sleep while the volume is mounted (which of course, is not a usable workaround but hopefully provides a lead on what is causing it).

@mountaincat

I don't know, I have used Thunderbay 4's on the M1. I did a test just now, but it was limited, as it was set up for 11.3 beta, and I don''t want to have to reinstall it all over when I expect 11.3 beta imminently. Once that is out, I will test your setup again.

Interesting observation.

I'm running my ThunderBay 4 RAID on 2016 MBP and so far, so good from reliability perspective (continuous intensive tasks), so ThunderBay should be OK.

But I was trying to connect ThunderBay to the computer which was already running after reboot and can't mount it at all. Reboot with already connected ThunderBay resolved the issue.