Periodic Reboots with Big Sur and Softraid

There are no known kernel panics in the SoftRAID driver. You can attach a SoftRAID Tech Support file and I can look, see if there is something else involved.

@bob_stan

I do not see any direct cause. Can you (next time) save the panic log? Click "report to Apple", then "more" to get the log. Then copy paste it into text edit, or a text editor. Can you attach it here? (You may need to rename it as txt, I realize, as Text edit only saves as RTF)

I am not in a position to send a log at this moment, but I have a client with a similar setup, getting the exact same issue. We had to put their old mac mini back so they would stop the random restarts that would occur every 4-5 hours. Was hoping there would be a newer beta to try, but as of the moment it is unusuable. Brand new M1 and brand new OWC raids with softraid, so no chance of software conflict otherwise.

Is the RAID volume HFS or APFS?

Can you make sure the user saves the panic log? (and afterwards, a SoftRAID Technical Support file)

(report to Apple, click more info, then copy/paste the panic into Text edit or a text editor)

I dont think this is in the SoftRAID driver, but there is no way to know at present

I can run an M1 for days with heavy IO, there are a couple special cases where there are issues, but you are not describing any.

In my case, I believe the issue was actually caused by Parallels 16.  I run two parallels windows vm's on my mac pro. After days of trying to isolate the problem I found there was alw2ays a vm running when the problem occurred.  In Parallels I changed the Hypervisor settings to use the Apple Hypervisor instead of the Parallels one and no lock ups or crashes since since.  Fingers crossed.

I hope to have an error log this weekend (Have to hook the new OWC raids back up). But there are no other apps running, nothing installed at all except 2 x OWC 32GB Thunderbolt Raid drives. It's as clean as you can get. 

Does it matter how the RAID volume is formatted? Is APFS a problem?

@rupp

No APFS is not a problem. It is just another volume mounted by mac OS. there should be no differences in kernel panics based on the volume. SoftRAID's driver does not care what the volumes are as far as day to day operations.

Not to say there are no Apple issues. I noted with Time Machine, a kernel bug that a user pointed out, that I narrowed down to if you run Time Machine on an M1, on a SoftRAID HFS volume, that can trigger a kernel panic. That is a Time Machine bug.