It may not be possible yet to perform a fresh installation of 10.15.4. For the time being I've made the following change to
Catalina Mini-Guide:
View attachment 457572
So some interesting news to report...
TL;DR
- Good news...I was able to to a fresh install of 10.15.4 using native NVRAM / No errors / Perfect!
I can go into more detail here but the net of it was making sure to do the install with native NVRAM enabled straight away using
@CaseySJ mini-guide for Catalina but building in native NVRAM support right from the start on the USB drive as he outlines for post-install.
- Bad news...this will take a little more to explain...
I started adding applications and download my Photos library, sync’ing iMessages, etc. I probably worked for about an hour. I walked away and when I came back my three monitors had all the same information up but everything was frozen except the mouse. Nothing I could do to get anything to happen but yet disk activity was significant.
I rebooted, checked APFS and did the same. This time I put up Activity Monitor and took a snapshot of the time as soon as I stopped doing anything on the system. In about 6’ish minutes things locked up again, mouse movement only and disk activity due to downloading 50+ GB of photos must have been proceeding. The process that looked like the culprit...
mediaanalysisd
So I did this a few more times to make sure it was that
and it was. I’m not sure if this is the actual issue that is referenced in
@CaseySJ guide that effects RX 5700 (XT) owners, but it is what’s causing the issue in this case (and I’m using a Vega 64 to drive all three of the monitors). Interestingly “
photolibraryd” and “
com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService” (as I’m looking at Activity Monitor right now) are using 10% and 50% of my CPU and they cause no issues. It seems “mediaanalysisd” only runs after some reasonable period of no activity and that’s where the problem occurs.
I should also note that I did not encounter this this issue on my clean 10.15.3 install...so I’m not sure what’s different.
I’m going to let the system run overnight and see if it can complete all the photos tasks even with the system frozen as it seems like it is still doing a significant amount of processing. I’ll report back in the Morning (it’s 9:27pm here in PDT right now). Worst case I’ll do a fresh install of 10.15.3 and wait for a fix or workaround as disabling that service isn’t an option for my as I use Photos a lot.
I’m open to any suggestions!
Lam