Possible hint about random freezes, and a farewell for now

[TreeMan2011]

Three weeks after installing High Sierra my system died. All indications point to it being the power supply, but like many others here I had been plagued by the random unexpected freezes, plus I never could get things like iChat or Facetime to work. So after seven years of fiddling with a hackintosh, I decided enough was enough and bought a Mac Mini. But this has given me a bit of insight into what may be causing some of the freezes.

On a Mac Mini the same problem exists, except that instead of freezing it displays the same Apple logo you get at bootup, with a progress bar at about the halfway point (it never moves). This happens after the computer has sat for a long period of time without being used, which was primarily when it happened on my hackintosh as well, except that on the hackintosh no graphic was displayed. If you press and release the power button two or three times the system comes back. Apple support pages typically will tell you to start by resetting the SMC and the NVRAM or PRAM, but hackintoshes don't have those. So my theory is that High Sierra is trying to put the system to sleep, but that involves accessing something in the SMC or NVRAM/PRAM that it can't find on a hackintosh, so it just locks up.

But you may say, I have my system set to never sleep. Well, so did I. I even installed a program from the app store called AntiSleep and it didn't help (on either the hackintosh or the Mac Mini). But I think I may have stumbled across a couple of things that might help. First, in the Energy Saver settings, make sure that "Wake for network access" is checked - this prevents a specific type of sleep state that is different from normal sleep. And also, bring up a terminal window and at a command prompt enter caffeinate -s and let it run in the background and see if that helps. If it does, there's probably some way to run it in the background. One of these two things, or maybe both, has prevented my Mac Mini from going to sleep for the last six hours or so, but I am not certain which.

Also from the command line, run man caffeinate and man pmset to see other ways to determine the current power management settings and to prevent sleep under various circumstances. This will not solve the totally random freezes, that happen while you are in the middle of typing an important document but it may solve any that are caused by High Sierra thinking it should take a nap no matter what the Energy Saver settings say.

This is obviously a subject that needs more investigation, but since my hackintosh is dead and I have no immediate plans to revive it (Silverstone case that takes a weird sized power supply), I'll probably not be posting in this forum anymore in the foreseeable future. Thank you to all who have helped me, or tried to help over the years, but I am getting old and I just can't take any more of the weirdness of hackintosh builds.

 

[TreeMan2011]

So here is what I have discovered using a real Mac Mini. If, at a terminal window, you enter "sudo pmset -g" and your password you will see the System-wide power settings. Note especially the settings for the following:

standby
hibernatemode
autopoweroff

ALL of those should be set to 0, at least for testing purposes. In my case, autopoweroff was set to 1 by default, so I used this command to change it:

sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 0

The first thing I noticed after doing that was that when my display had gone to sleep and I pressed a key to wake it up, it came back much faster than it had previously. And the second thing is that so far the system hasn't gone to sleep. If that doesn't work, also try the things I mentioned in my previous post that are applicable to your system, but to me all indications are that these freezes may be related to power management, and specifically to some new mode that Apple implemented to make their computers compliant with EU energy standards, that tries to put a real Mac into a deeper sleep state than just the usual sleep. As I mentioned above, my theory is that this new energy saving mode, along with the lack of PRAM and/or SMC in hackintosh builds, might just be the source of many of these unexplained crashes, especially if your system ran fine prior to Sierra/High Sierra.

If you want to know what each pmset setting does, just enter "man pmset" in the terminal window, and/or search for pmset in your favorite search engine.

 

[TreeMan2011]

One final finding - although the above helped, nothing I did actually solved the problem until I also disabled display sleep in the Energy Saver settings. That is, I moved the "Turn display off after" slider all the way to the right, to the "Never" setting. Since I did that (about a week ago) I have not seen the Apple logo and progress bar one single time. Of course the downside is that I now have to manually switch off the monitor when I am ready to walk away from the system. But it is the only thing that seems to work to stop these ridiculous freezes. As a side note, Apple Support was of no help; after having me run a bunch of tests their only suggestion was to reinstall the operating system (keep in mind this is a brand new Mac Mini from an Apple store, that came with High Sierra already installed, and I immediately upgraded it to the latest version).

I cannot help thinking that at least some of the freezes you guys are seeing are related to this problem in some way. On a real Mac Mini the problem manifests itself only after the display has been sleeping, and you try to bring it out of sleep by pressing a key or clicking the mouse. Then you see the same Apple logo you see during a bootup sequence, with a progress bar underneath that never moves. The mouse cursor does appear and you can move it around, but you just can't see anything to click on. If you then depress the power switch for a second or so, the display goes through a sequence of flashes and blackouts but usually comes back to the desktop after several seconds. However, sometimes the desktop does not come back and then all you can do is a hard power off and power back on cycle.

Since your systems don't contain real Apple hardware, it would not surprise me if it is the same problem manifesting itself in a different way. Before my previous system died, I do remember that on occasions when it appeared frozen, sometimes (rarely) depressing the power switch for a second or two would bring it back. But in that case I am thinking maybe there are two different types of freezes. One is the type that occurs when the display is asleep, and you come back and it won't wake up (or the desktop appears but clicking on anything does nothing), and I think that may well be a different manifestation of the problem I have encountered on the Mac Mini. The other type is when you are using the system normally and you get the spinning pinwheel of death, and if you don't immediately reboot (if you even can) the system becomes totally unresponsive. I have not yet seen that on my new system, and in any case I don't think it is at all related to the issue I have described above.

It just seems weird to me that ultimately these issues seem graphics-related somehow, and that not letting the system OR the display sleep seems to solve the problem on a real Mac Mini. That may or may not have a similar effect on your system, but maybe worth a try.