Kontakt 7 causing Kernel panic shutoff on Mac Studio! (KT-8785)

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Answers

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member

    @strigi

    I found a way to consistently reproduce the crash.

    1. Load Kontakt 7, Guitar Rig 6 or Komplete Kontrol VST3 to an Ableton Live track (the problem may exist with other NI plugins as well but I didn't bother testing it further)
    2. Activate Mission Control (for example, swipe up with three fingers on MBP trackpad or Magic Trackpad)
    3. Boom! Freeze + DCP panic + crash and restart

    I am not going to contact Apple as this only happens with NI plugins. Instead, I am going to stop using NI stuff until and if they fix critical issues like this one. It is not easy to abandon Kontakt, but I really don't have a choice. Switching to a Windows PC just for music is a possibility, but why would I do that when everything else works relatively well? And I don't even know how well NI stuff work on Windows…

    Honestly, I don't even care anymore if it's partially Apple's fault. The other companies obviously don't use graphics hacks and manage not to crash the entire system. If NI cannot deal with macOS, it would be fair to stop supporting the platform.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member

    It's apparently the same issue as here:

    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/27733/ableton-live-12-keeps-crashing-with-ni-kontakt-7

  • strigi
    strigi Member Posts: 66 Member
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/143872#Comment_143872

    Yeah that sounds like a mega annoying issue. So I'll try to help a little bit based off of what I know:
    - Earlier in this thread by "PoorFellow" posted this:

    "Source : Kernel Panic on Sleep with MacMini Using HDMI and USB-C Monitors With Custom Resolution (with App Not Running) #2622

    Comment by waydabber Mar 15, 2024

    No problem. I understand people expect their Macs to work properly out of the box and whenever there is a crash, the first suspect is a third party app - and when the crash is related to a display, the suspect will be a third party app that deals with displays. I think in exactly the same lines whenever such a thing happens. :)

    These DCPEXT issues date back to the first Apple Silicon Macs. It seems Apple still could not resolve all these issues even though the DCP's formware/rtOS is being tweaked all the time. My experience is that Sonoma actually made things worse (as I mentioned, I can replicate the DCP error issue anytime by simply playing a video on a screen A and use accessibility zoom on screen B, the bug is probably related to the way Sonoma changed how multi-monitor zoom works. The same thing happens on M1, M2, M3, completely unrelated systems/installations. Also, many displays that work fine on PCs (or Intel Macs) produce all kinds of connection/sleepwake/no-signal etc issues on Apple Silicon Macs. There are many other display related bugs as well (obviously I came across these heavily)."
    ————————————————————————————

    - There's probably some insight there. Specifically, the points about it being replicated with accessibility zooms on displays (yours seems to happen with a gesture move, which is a big problem!).

    - Set your Kontakt 7 windows to 100% zoom by default. And leave them alone.
    - Reset your system preferences Display settings and leave them on default if you can and see if you can still work normally.

    - I had an old bug related to Guitar Rig 6 that was crashing me in Ableton Live Suite 11 whenever I had other plug-ins open with it (namely iZotope plug-ins). I also had issues with Ableton crashing with Kontakt 7 plug-ins, namely the Electric guitar plug-ins. The solution was two-fold: update Ableton and Native access, and then ditch Guitar Rig 6 (I think it's since been fixed but I wouldn't know because I wanted to use Guitar Rig 7).

    - If you're experiencing this annoying kernel issue AFTER updating to 14.4.1, then I suggest creating a new thread and also report it to NI for Kontakt 7 and share the thread with them and the moderators as well. They can't solve your issue unless they have all the info (plus crash logs) from your sessions.

    - You can post your crash log on the Apple Developer Feedback forum and see if it gets any hits.

    - You can also connect with a senior advisor in the creative apps division of Apple support to see if it's something they can actually fix on their end (which would, inevitably help the entire world, lol).

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member
    edited March 29

    And if someone at NI is interested into looking at this, the crash doesn't occur in Reaper.

  • Garion2K
    Garion2K Member Posts: 14 Member

    Same issue here with the VST3 version of Komplete Kontrol 3.2.1 and Kontakt 7.9.0 in Ableton Live 12 on Sonoma 14.4.1, but only when using Screen Mirroring to an iPad for an extended display. Turning off Screen Mirroring prevents the crashes for me. This problem started with Sonoma 14.4.1. 14.4.0 and earlier were fine.

    I have 2 Apple Studio displays connected via Thunderbolt 4 and a 27" Dell 4K display connected via HDMI to a 2023 Mac mini M2 Pro (12 CPU / 19 GPU) with 32GB RAM.

  • strigi
    strigi Member Posts: 66 Member
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/143879#Comment_143879

    Hmmm

    • This sounds like they fixed some external display issues with 14.4.1 but still have the iPad issue. I would HIGHLY recommend reporting this to Apple.
    • I suggest trying different display cable types/or just new cables in general (if you're able) as this has solved the issue for certain people, no promises of course. Also, try shorter cables, anything under 2 meters.
    • As mentioned before, try setting your zoom levels/display configurations, etc. all to default across the entire spectrum of your tech you're using.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member

    I am getting the crash even with MacBook Pro disconnected from external display. So it’s not only external display or mirroring issue. And while it may be ultimately caused by some Apple weird bug or edge case, it only happens with (many) NI plugins and only in Ableton Live. Other plugins work well in Live. That tells me that NI really has extremely fragile code at the very bottom of their stack and that it will probably never be truly fixed. Any small change in the OS or a host can completely break everything. We are dealing here with very, very bad software, probably the worst I’ve eve seen given that it’s a pro software, not some hobby project. And I am not one of those people who trash on everything. Software development is hard and bugs are inevitable. But NI has enormous amount of critical bugs all the time and fixes them very slowly while new bugs keep appearing and appearing. I’d rather spend my time making music with slightly worse sample libraries than dealing with these ridiculous issues all the time.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member

    The crash does occur in Logic Pro with AU units and in Live with VST3s, but not in Reaper.

  • strigi
    strigi Member Posts: 66 Member
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/143937#Comment_143937

    I don't necessarily disagree with you. I'm a software dev myself, an audio engineer, and I work in DSP and audio software projects. Code like theirs is a real pain. Like you're getting at, this code is really contingent on the platform itself and does not exist very solidly up against updates. With that being said, the best we can do is hope for them to actually listen to our cries for help. Idk who's at the top of NI but having to wait for them to even respond is a real pain in the toosh. For that, I get it. However, I'm hoping this thread can be for solutions that actually work. The sad part of all of this is that I have no clue what exactly is causing the issue. All I can do is offer my findings and troubleshoot it to the best of my ability. Hopefully we find something soon. My assumption for why I'm not experiencing exactly what you guys are experiencing is that I'm on a Mac Studio. Idk at all why THAT makes a difference (or maybe it's specific plug-ins)???? I'm not sure. Lemme know how I can help guys! :)

  • timber
    timber Member Posts: 14 Member

    Kontakt 7.9.0 running as VST3 in Ableton 12 on Sonoma 14.4.1 still causes this panic for me when opened on an external screen even with my Macbook Pro M3max being closed and the zoom set to 100%. I don't feel like reproducing this if I can avoid it in order to prevent disk integrity problems. So the only workaround for now is to not use NI plugins or only work on the builti-n Macbook screen. This is one of the worst problems I have encountered in years and it's a shame that the 14.4.1 update didn't fix it. I have no idea if the ball is in Apple's or NI's court but both are big companies so please get to it and make this go away.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member
    edited April 1

    @timber
    It happens while using the built-in MacBook screen as well.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member
    edited April 1

    Given that the crash report references RTKit, the bug is probably related to the following security change introduced in 14.4:


    RTKit

    Available for: macOS Sonoma

    Impact: An attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability may be able to bypass kernel memory protections. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited.

    Description: A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved validation.

    CVE-2024-23296


    NI plugins may be doing some kernel-level reading or writing that is not valid anymore. Or something on those lines…

  • timber
    timber Member Posts: 14 Member

    It seems to have to do with display resolution / scale. Just like a previous poster mentioned zoom. I changed my monitor's resolution from 2560x1440 to 3008x1692 (out of a maximum of 3840 x 2160) and the crash won't happen anymore. Weird. I found a few interesting related points from a poster named waydabber here: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/discussions/2622#discussioncomment-8805198 Could be the problem is hidden deeplöy under the hood and certain apps stumble across it under certain circumstances.

  • ivicam
    ivicam Member Posts: 60 Member

    BetterDisplay issue looks related, but not identical to this one. In their case, the panic occurs while sleeping and the kernel panic is different. In case of NI plugin crashes, we have

     DCPEXT1 PANIC - program_swap: Async Swap request landing on unsupported platform. 

  • Machinesworking
    Machinesworking Member Posts: 6 Member
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/144288#Comment_144288

    I'm willing to bet your'e right. Love NI, but they're notorious like a lot of developers are of stretching the rules to gain an easier cross platform code base. My crashes are specific to Kontakt (at 7.90 now), Sonoma (14.4.1 now), two monitors hooked up to an M2 Studio, and either Reaper or DP latest versions of those DAWs. Selecting anything in Kontakt window is an instant kernel panic and restart. It does not occur with one monitor attached only, or with Kontakt in Komplete Kontrol, or with Kontakt 7 in standalone. It does not occur in Live 12, Logic or Bitwig. No other plugin on my system does this, so I can't believe that it's just a java issue, it's some GUI code in Kontakt that messes with the OS as a plugin.

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