[Sticky] Monterey Crash/kernel panics

I need to jump in on this thread as I seem to be having similar problem as the above others. Panic crashes (which I've been onto Apply about this week, including a three hour drive to the store, and an Engineer's session) which they confirmed there's an issue with wake sleep but they could tell me what what actually causing it. Not until I looked in this forums. Typically from sleep within a minute or so the mouse freezes and them a crash follows. This is also typically when the external RAID unit isn't attached, but not exclusively.  

I'm also having problems with the OWC 8B unmounting drives either, either the 6 disk RAID5 collection or the two individual single disks I have. I'm had missing drives in the RAID when coming back from sleep, reboot typically sort that out. 

Along with the above, and I did have an extensive email conversation with OWC support on why the drives are being put into a semistate of sleep while I'm actually working on my M1 Max. They suggested they knew about the issue and it was a M1 problem and the work-a-round was to put the power setting for the monitor to never in both battery and on power which does seems to help.

Plus, I'm also seeing this in the SoftRAID logs: Feb 15 21:48:40 - SoftRAID Driver: SoftRAID determined that there is a problem with your Mac. Turn off sleep in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences to prevent this problem from occurring.  <<< It is actually off, I never run with this setting turned on. 

Any suggestions and or response would be greatly appreciated. 

I realized I should have posted my recent question here if you can delete the other thread.

I recently got the Thunderbay 8, I've been getting some kernel panics when copying a lot of files. I'm on the latest versions of everything including Softraid 6.2.1.  Can you tell me from the following problem report if this is related to Softraid or something else? Thanks!

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xfffffe001910470c): "dart-apciec1 (0xfffffe24ccad0000): DART(DART) error: SID 3 PTE invalid exception on read with DVA 0x81b73800 (TTBR 0 SEG 0x40 PTE 0x6dc) ERROR_STATUS 0x83000004 TIME 0x14b6e993619c TTE 0 AXI_ID 0)" @AppleT8020DART.cpp:1411

@rsmith4321 

this crash is the IO (thunderbolt) chip crashing. It is related to something in M1 and SoftRAID.

What if you connect your enclosure 5 minutes after startup?

Apple is working on this, but it has been dragging for months.

@cell-666 

In the panic crashes, if you see dart on the top line, it is a IO chip crash, the chip that controls Thunderbolt. Apple engineering has a failing system and is working on this, but it has been taking a long time.

the sleep issue is not specific to M1. Generally you can reduce this issue if display sleep is set to never and put drives to sleep unchecked. the issue is made more frequent when more external devices are present. There is no known fix at this time. It has been reported to Apple.

The disks ejecting is another thunderbolt issue. Its again more common with multiple external devices (including monitors) connected. Sometimes tightening cables, changing where connections are connected, etc can alleviate this.

These issues have been going on for years, Apple/intel really need to address them.

@softraid-support Hmm if this is an issue going on for years it sounds like I really need to find another solution, I really can't have a device that crashes a lot for my work. I already have it unchecked to put hard disk to sleep and checked to prevent mac from sleeping automatically, I don't want to leave the displays on all night if possible. Would this happen with any thunderbolt attached storage and not just using Softraid?  I might have to switch to a nas if that is the case. 

@rsmith4321 

Its a thunderbolt issue, yes. SoftRAID's driver alerts users, other devices will not report it, as Finder does not report it, this is ignored. So the problem is hidden.

One aspect particularly affects SoftRAID, since there are multiple disks making a volume, is we need to detect this, as the disks get assigned different bsd numbers, (with a disconnect during sleep) which is dangerous, so SoftRAID's driver will lock the volume and tell the user to restart. This prevents any data corruption from this bug. This does not seem to be a problem with normal volumes, as they only have one disk comprising the volume.

I think that is why this bug is being ignored, it primarily affects RAID volumes.

@softraid-support I really love the Thunderbay 8 for speed, price and that it's directly attached since Drobo seems to be gone.  Is there any hope of this being worked out soon?  My fear is that with a software solution like this things will be constantly breaking with mac updates. I use to have a Thunderbolt 2 Drobo that didn't seem to have this issue, is it only Thunderbolt 3 that is the problem? I'm just not sure what to do at this point. I could eject the volume at night, but I have an online backup system that runs at night. If just leaving the monitors on all night will fix it I could do that. Do you think this will eventually be worked out? If not it seems like this should be posted on the purchase page for the Thunderbay that it will crash the mac every night, that is a pretty important thing to know. 

@softraid-support 

Thanks for the reply, I don't see DART in my top line of the crash report? I swapped my late 2019 i9 for this M1 Max, exact same setup up, even had MacOS12 on the i9 just to make sure that SoftRAID was running as expected before swapping to the M1. Definitely a M1 specific issue as I never had any problems like this with the i9. Did the cable swapping about at OWC's suggestion which made no difference.  

Do you think switching to something like this https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tl-d800c and then using Softraid with that would solve the issue since it's connects with USB 3.2 instead of Thunderbolt?

@rsmith4321 

I don't know whether USB would make a difference. this is a different panic. Did you save the full report? If so, save to text edit, convert to plain text and save as a .txt file and attach it.

@rsmith4321 

Try leaving the monitors on. (You can power them off, also)

I really don't know about a fix. this does not affect enough users that Apple has shown concern over this. It seems to affect 5% of SoftRAID users, maybe less. Its when there are lots of devices that issues happen.

@softraid-support I thought it would be convenient to attach my older Drobo and a couple of external drives using a usb hub connected to the thunderbolt port on the Thunderbay.  Do you think connecting those extra drives to that same port could cause an issue, I could connected them back to a usb port on my mac mini.

Just realised there was a new update so I've now put 6.2.1 and got back to putting the power setting to never.

Although this wasn't a good start after the reboot.

@rsmith4321 

I don't have a clean answer to that. Give it a try, it it works and is reliable, keep doing it. Mixing Thunderbolt and USB may not always work.

@cell-666 

I need you to uninstall SoftRAID, and give it another go.This Monitor issue is something that needs fixing, I am working on reproducing it in house, so we can fix this.

Here are the long instructions to manually uninstall.

How to manually Remove/uninstall the SoftRAID driver and components:

Paste each command line below into the terminal application. You will need your normal admin password for some steps.

Delete the SoftRAID driver:
sudo rm -r /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext
sudo touch /Library/Extensions
sudo kextcache -fu /

Now, Restart your computer

Remove the daemon and SoftRAID Monitor:
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.softraid.softraidd.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchAgents/com.softraid.SoftRAIDMonitor.plist

Remove the SoftRAID application support directory:
sudo rm -r /Library/Application\ Support/SoftRAID

Remove all the SoftRAID preferences:
defaults delete com.softraid.SoftRAID

Remove preference files
sudo rm -r ~/Library/Preferences/com.softraid.*

reset the extensions caches:
sudo kmutil clear-staging
sudo kextcache -i /

Restart the Mac. SoftRAID volumes will no longer mount on the desktop, but that is temporary, until you reinstall the driver.

When you run SoftRAID to install the driver, do not immediately restart. wait until the dialog box pops up to go to System Preferences/Security. "Allow" OWC as an Identified developer, now restart later when you quit System Preference, go to SoftRAID and restart.