Contribute
Register

Chicken or egg? Help wrap my brain around my dual purpose machine!

Status
Not open for further replies.
I have ordered:

Gigabyte Z97x-UD7 TH
i7 4790K
16GB (2x 8GB) G Skill Sniper DDR3 1866
Gigabyte GV-N780OC-3GD GTX780
Corsair RM650
Bitfenix Ghost case
Crucial MX100 256GB SSD
Intel 520 120GB SSD
TP Link TL-WDN4800
IOGear GBU521
SYBA IO Crest SY-PEX30016
External USB Superdrive
Apple keyboard and mouse

Wish me luck!
 
Well I built the computer exactly as above (except for the Superdrive, I have gone without for now). To be honest I built the PC and just used Win7 for a few months, hah.

Yesterday I installed Yosemite with UniBeast/MultiBeast, following the guide on this site. And... it just works? Frighteningly easy?!

Wifi, bluetooth, onboard audio, GPU, etc. I haven't tested the onboard video or ethernet.

Until.... FREEZE, and kernel panic on reboot. Prior to this it had been running quite happily for a few hours. The most recent things I had done prior to the freeze, in order:

- paired bluetooth Mighty Mouse (and Magic mouse);
- downloaded and installed Yosemite drivers for M-Audio Profire2626 Firewire audio interface;
- powered off, plugged in and powered Profire, booted Hackintosh;
- set audio output to Profire, downloaded Spotify, listened to an album or two via the Profire - all good!;
- logged into App Store, bought and began download of Garageband, navigated back to App store main page to browse around while I wait and, FREEZE.

Reset, kernal panic.
Reset, kernal panic.
Cold boot, works for maybe a minute, then freeze.
Reset, kernal panic.
Cold boot, works for maybe a minute, then freeze.

So I power down, disconnect the firewire cable, power up and it seems to be fine. Further testing by reconnecting the Firewire device seemed to confirm that it was causing the problem. So I slept on it.

Which brings me to this morning, where upon firing it up with the Profire connected it is working apparently fine. And here I am playing music on Spotify through the Profire, and typing this message.

Thing is, it feels like I'm missing a step with the Firewire. I seem to recall needing to do something (a kext?) when I was doing my due diligence months ago, but now I can't turn up anything in my searches. I might be dreaming?


EDIT: I think it's random when the KP occurs, whether reset/reboot/cold start. I haven't yet had the KP occur when the Profire is turned off, and I haven't yet had the KP while starting in -v verbose mode.

The KP mentions IOUSBFamily and AppleUSBComposite.
 
EDIT: I think it's random when the KP occurs, whether reset/reboot/cold start. I haven't yet had the KP occur when the Profire is turned off, and I haven't yet had the KP while starting in -v verbose mode.

The KP mentions IOUSBFamily and AppleUSBComposite.

Although my build is different than yours, I have seen those sporadic issues in the past that seemed to be related some to some USB thing, and hopefully this will help.
I noticed you are using IOGear GBU521 for your bluetooth, in my case, particularly after installing, or after running updates, there would times where the machine would boot just fine, and then kernel panic at random times, or other times where the machine would fail to boot and get a panic before loading the OS.

From what I have gathered, if there is an issue with the bluetooth, it would panic once whatever thread is checking it triggers the panic.

Short answer of it all: to fix it, I just unplugged my bluetooth. When this fixed things, and allowed me to boot and work fine, I was afraid I would have to keep it off all the time, but I set the nvram boot-args flag for kext-dev-mode=1 ,

sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1"

and precompiled the kexts and all that.

sudo kextcache-system-prelinked-kernel && kextcache-system-caches

And then reboot (just for good measure), once booted and everything was stable, I plugged the Bluetooth device in, and now it works just fine. After that, for some reason, I don't get any issues booting up or anything (maybe because the kexts are precompiled, I dunno)

Every time I update, if I fail to boot, that is one of the things I try, unplug it, reboot normally and then plug it back in.

Hope this helps. (And hope that's the last of your issues :p)


EDIT: Oh, if you can, write back if this helps.
 
So I tried unplugging the bluetooth USB dongle. Booted no problem, and I sat listening to music through my firewire audio interface for 40min or so and felt pretty good about things! So I braved a reboot, went well for 10min and then it froze.

When it freezes the audio goes into a short repeating loop and the system is unresponsive to any inputs. No beach ball. The fans in the computer all seem to fire up to maximum immediately.

So I tried a few reboots after that, and it would run for 1 or 2 minutes before freezing up again. Whether there would be a kernel panic on reboot was a bit of a lottery. The kernel panic was the same IOUSBFamily / AppleUSBComposite message.

What's with the time-til-freeze getting shorter each reboot? And the fans going nuts? Is this a heat issue / do firewire PCI cards create heat?

Then as I rebooted I turned off the firewire audio interface, and switched my headphones to the onboard sound and here I am listening to music for the last 30min, no problems.

It's gotta be either the firewire card or the firewire audio interface?!

I guess my next experiments will be:
installing the firewire audio interface in Windows and testing; and
find another firewire device to test in OS X.

But I'd love to hear any ideas you may have! Thanks very much BluePhoenix for your suggestion.
 
Hi there, I am having the exact same issues with a Focusrite Saffire pro in Yosemite on my 9 series board, the sequence of working/ not working is very similar.

1st i installed a firewire card (Syba low profile one with Ti chipset) this is the exact card others are using here for pro audio without issues. I didn't install any kexts for this, the card is recognized by the OS and I have read that is all that is required (although maybe we are both wrong and some sort of kext is required by Yosemite!!??)

Next I installed Saffire mixcontrol, all good, no problems....

Upon connecting the Saffire it was detected by the Mixcontrol software which told me that a firmware update was required before I could do anything else, so I allowed the firmware update, this went fine and it told me a reboot was required....

After the reboot it worked for a few mins then I experienced the EXACT same freeze as you
When it freezes the audio goes into a short repeating loop and the system is unresponsive to any inputs.
Hard power off was required- due to this type of freeze there is no console info to help with trouble shooting :crazy:

Then I half remembered something about cables (my brain is soooo full of half understood info ATM!!!!) so I tried a different cable (with FW 800-400 adapter) on a different port to the one I used for the firmware update and.... Perfect!!! it was working great for about 4 hours solid- I was so happy- I tested the inputs with various mics and tested the outputs- everything was working (although I hadn't tested the spdif or adat) that night I went to bed with a BIG smile on my face :D

The next day I turned it all on and got the "short repeating loop" freeze after about ten mins...I hard powered off, disconnected the Saffire, turned back on and all was good, no feezes- onboard audio working great in Logic Pro X. Tried again with the Saffire which was OK for about 1/2 hour... then- short repeating loop freeze. I tried both FW leads in the various ports on my FW card but the short repeating loop occurred again and again, sooner and sooner each time.

Now I am at the point when I can use Logic Pro X with the on board audio flawlessly, for long periods- no drop outs or buffer issues and importantly no freezes, but as soon as I connect the Saffire I get a near instant freeze- at times before I have even fired up Logic- just playing iTunes!! :(

First I thought this was related to the Mixcontrol Software conflicting with the AppleHDA kext from Multibeast, so I replaced this with the original AppleHDA kext but still got the freeze.

As part of my testing I have also connected my Alesis MultiMix 16 Firewire desk to my hack (although this has no Yosemite drivers) and experienced the same freeze after a few min's- so this could possibly be a firewire implementation thing on Yosemite (or 9 series mobo's with Haswell cpu's) but to be honest much more info will be required to draw a conclusion here....

I managed to save a log of Saffire Mixcontrol crashing just before one of the freezes, maybe this will shed some light on the situation. Maybe a resident expert can find the time to look it over :D

To be honest I am glad I have found someone else with this issue- we can't be the only ones who have built a Hackintosh recently for pro audio use and are having this FW issue- hopefully we can sort it out together ! :D
 

Attachments

  • saffire mixcontrol crash report.pdf
    76.7 KB · Views: 172
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience. Are you getting a kernel panic on boot at all (with your Saffire turned on)?

My Hackintosh works beautifully for long periods using onboard sound. I have an old MOTU FireWire interface somewhere which I might test next, if there's Yosemite drivers for it.

Have you tried any other FireWire devices (non audio)?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top