System slows down and dies on Photos, no errors or panics

[Frisootje]

Hi there,

First time poster, long time member. Some background: I've now successfully built a Hackintosh with a Gigabyte GA77XUP4TH board and a Sandy Bridge i7-2600K, using Radeon RX580 gfx as I couldn't get my Nvidia card to behave with my Dell UP2715K monitor. With the Radeon installed, it's an awesome experience in 5K. I first installed High Sierra 10.13.6 as I didn't want to dive into Mojave straight away, figuring that HS would have most bugs worked out. And it's been a fairly smooth experience, only surprise was that I needed USBInjectAll to get my USB to function when running as a MacPro6,1 - I started the machine as a MacPro5,1 but the 5K gfx wouldn't work then. Other than that, only FakeSMC installed and the HW monitor, the Realtek kext for networking and support for the onboard audio.

My only problem has been what I described in the title - under High Sierra, as soon as I started the Photos app, the system would slow down to a crawl, with even the clock starting to lose seconds before coming to a complete stand still. The mouse pointer remains responsive, but the rest of the system is frozen. When I hit reset, the machine just comes back up as if nothing happened. No error message, no dialog saying 'you restarted because of a problem' - nothing. Before it starts to freeze, I don't even see CPU use increasing or anything like that. It just withers and dies.

After upgrading to Mojave, the problem has (unfortunately) not gone away. Still Photos dies, and now also the Pref Pane on Screen Savers, when it displays a preview of the screensaver I've selected - the screen saver itself works fine. Anything else I've tried so far works well, it just dies on these two points.

I've run Memtest86 several times and the memory is fine. If the system runs under Windows, no problems either.

Does anyone see a pattern here? Recognise or suspect something? Does Photos do anything special that other apps don't do? What would be the connection with the small screen saver previews?

I've seen one thread on the forum with the same problem, but no answers there either.

Thanks
Friso

 

[Kittciokas]

Just yesterday i had the same problem after i deleted my iCloud related files in order to fix Continuity/Handoff/iMessage. The problem was that iCloud had to index many photos on my Hackintosh with photos in iCloud when i logged back in to iCloud again. It was like 16k of photos. I just deleted the photo library file (in [user]/Photos folder) and let the iCloud to download them back for me. It fixed the issue. I found this suggestion on the other topic on this forum: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/photos-app-makes-system-freeze.251513/

 

[ekohn00]

I have the same problem.
I tried the fix, which worked for photos only temporary, as it came back.
That fix doesn’t fix the problem with desktops.

 

[Kittciokas]

I have the same problem.
I tried the fix, which worked for photos only temporary, as it came back.
That fix doesn’t fix the problem with desktops.

The problem hasn't came back to me, at least yet. Everything is running smoothly.

EDIT: I just tried to open Wallpaper/Screen Saver settings and it did instantly slowed down, i needed to hard restart. So the issue still is there. Photos still works great, at least for now. I guess it's something to do with RX 580, as we all use this GPU. I guess i need to delete Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext and see what happens then. I might try to enable and disable RadeonDeInit in Clover > Graphics. I'm running without it right now. I also have a small issue on login screen. The monitor flashes single time just before the login screen and i also can hear that at the same time GPU fans stop and start spinning again. As it still reaches login screen i don't mind this issue very much.

EDIT 2: I removed Lilu.kext and WhateverGreen.kext - it didn't help. I disabled Memory XMP in BIOS (someone suggested it in another thread) - it didn't help. I enabled RadeonDeInit - it didn't help either. Next try - disable "Inject Intel" (in Clover > Graphics) - i don't have built in GPU either way. I'll try to disable NvidiaWeb (in Clover > System Parameters).
I must note, that everything worked fine in High Sierra, but i was using GTX 960 then. I swapped it to RX 580 to get Mojave with hardware acceleration. I updated from High Sierra to Mojave with RX 580 installed.

EDIT 3: Disabling Inject Intel and NvidiaWeb didn't help either. Someone from another thread did a clean install of Mojave and it helped. I'm still not ready to do clean install yet as i need my Hackintosh for work. But if there will not be another solution, i'll do it sooner than later. I just want to ask all of you - have you updated to Mojave or fresh installed? I think, that most with this issue updated to Mojave.

 

[Kittciokas]

I think this has something to do with the update from High Sierra to Mojave and with Permissions. I was googling around and i found topic in another forum named "can't change wallpaper, system preferences crashes" where it was explained that System Preferences was crashing because it couldn't locate the wallpaper file (or didn't have the permissions to it). Just after i updated to Mojave and i tried to install BitDefender which worked well on High Sierra, it would just install BitDefender agent, but not the Antivirus for Mac app itself. I googled this issue and found BitDefender page, where it suggested to run Disk Utility's First Aid, which would fix the permissions (just google "How to deal with installation issues when only the Bitdefender Agent is installed"). In the previous mentioned forum about Wallpapers causing the freeze, it was suggested to run Permissions repair tool in Disk Utility too. I would be 100% sure that this is the reason except that this problem, at least in tonymacx86 forum, mostly occurs to those, who run RX 580 as their GPU's. Bitdefender page suggested to run Permission repair tool in Safe Mode, but i can't boot to Safe Mode on my Hackintosh. I tried to run Permission repair tool in normal mode but i made system totally unresponsive, so i had to reboot.

 

[Kittciokas]

I was able to run Permission repair tool - just had to wait it out until it finished for system to be fully responsive. I also tried to fix system permissions by running CleanMyMac X. Both of them didn't do a thing.

EDIT 1: Although my Photos works just fine for now, could it be that Photos crashes Desktop preferences? I mean there's option to choose a photo from Photos app as a wallpaper. Maybe it tries to load photos from Photos and it crashes.

 

[ekohn00]

EDIT 1: Although my Photos works just fine for now, could it be that Photos crashes Desktop preferences? I mean there's option to choose a photo from Photos app as a wallpaper. Maybe it tries to load photos from Photos and it crashes.

I appreciate all the tests....I did most of them too with no luck.
I don't think Photos is crashing Desktop Pref, since Desktop will crash on its own without loading Photos.
I thought maybe the new container format (HEIC) might have something to do with it, since it's new in both photos and desktop pref in Mohaje. that said, I can go into Photos package contents and open every file without. problem.

 

[Frisootje]

Really appreciate you guys testing all these things, I did a lot of those myself. In an effort to be a bit more methodical about it:

1. This machine had (for a short time) a GTX980, and had a clean High Sierra install. I cannot remember whether the issue was there with NVidia, would have to try over the weekend. I upgraded to a Radeon 580 just before making the move to Mojave. I have RadeonDeInit setting, and DualLink set to '1'. The machine boots well.

2. The issue was definitely there on Photos on High Sierra - and that was a clean install that had downloaded all photos from iCloud just a few days earlier. So I don't think it's because of the update to Mojave, and I don't think it's to do with processing many files - remember, the CPU utilisation doesn't rise at all.

3. The Screen Saver pref pane and Photos are related I think - they both use thumbnails. It seems to have something to do with thumbnails - either generating them of reading them or something like that. I suspect there is some sort of library that generates these thumbnails? Could that be used by both?

4. I find it really strange that the system just grinds to a halt and sits there without throwing an error or increasing CPU use or anything like that. What kind of problem causes such behaviour, in general terms? Is something halting the system? Does it have to do with CPU power states or anything like that?

It's really frustrating that I don't even know where to start looking. It's just such strange behaviour. My real Macs don't have it, otherwise I could call Apple about it.

Grtz
Friso

 

[ekohn00]

So I solved this for me, this morning. Not sure if it will last long:

I went into BIOS and changed IGPU from Auto to ON. Then reboot and set memory for IGPU to 128MB.

So far no issues with Photos.

 

[Kittciokas]

I did fresh install of Mojave two times - once i connect to iCloud, this issue comes back. So fresh install doesn't help.

So I solved this for me, this morning. Not sure if it will last long:

I went into BIOS and changed IGPU from Auto to ON. Then reboot and set memory for IGPU to 128MB.

So far no issues with Photos.

In my situation i can't do it. My build doesn't have integrated GPU. So there's no such option at all. I'm just glad that Photos app doesn't freeze my system. I can live without Wallpaper/Screensaver preferences, as i could set wallpaper without it. Just wanted to make my Hackintosh build as good as real Mac, but i think i'll wait until someones comes up with solution.

EDIT 1: I just remembered that when i tried to change iCloud profile/user account pictures, the system froze too - just like with Wallpapers/Screenshots preferences window. I must note, that it didn't froze right away. I tried to change it multiple times unsuccessfuly and only one of those times (the last one) it started to freeze the same way.

EDIT 2: I left Photos app running in the background and in around 3-5 minutes my Hackintosh froze. So, i guess, problem is bigger than i thought. I just found this topic: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/trouble-with-photos-app-crashing-system.189491/ i'm still reading it. But from what i managed to read - it might be memory (RAM) related. And i kinda makes sense. One of my memory stick just wasn't detected when i reinstalled Mojave at some point of post installation. I removed some dimms, rebooted with even less RAM, then turned Hackintosh off, put them both in and once booted - all RAM was detected. But i think that my Hackintosh my have problem with one o my RAM dimms. Especially because i bought those dimms separately and they're running in quad channel mode (this is against recommendations). I'll finish reading the thread and i'll try removing RAM dimms. I tried disabling XMP earlier, but it didn't change anything. In my config.plist XMP was never enabled, while i tried to Disable/Enable XMP in the BIOS with no results.