3

My laptop has been acting up recently. It's seemed especially slow, video and audio has been very jittery, and it seems unable to do simple stuff like playback YouTube videos without jitter.

This under-performance has been accompanied by a series of kernel panics and crashes. I am currently using the MacBook as my only development machine after a move while I wait for my iMac to make its way to me in a few weeks time.

In order to try and diagnose the problem I have:

  1. Performed a memtest on 1900MB of my memory by booting into single user mode (I am not sure of a better way to run memtest on a Mac)
  2. Performed a Disk Verification in Disk Utility by booting from the install disk
  3. Reinstalled OS 10.6, updated, etc.

None of the above have come up with any errors or improved the situation at all.

I am at a loss as to what I should do. Any advice or insight is welcome.

I include some of the logs below:

http://pastebin.com/GmtiaQJz
http://pastebin.com/PvmDa7i4
http://pastebin.com/r4h7iRVu

Update 1:
It also seems to be the case that en0 (Ethernet Interface) goes down after about an hour, ifconfig reports all fine but a self assigned ip. It might be an unrelated issue.

Update 2:
Now I am seeing weird graphical artifacts. Black/multicolored polygonal shapes on windows etc.

karel
  • 13,706
mjmdavis
  • 131

2 Answers2

3

Kernel panics like the spinlock acquisition error cannot be caused by applications. This is either a hardware defect or a kernel extension malfunction. Especially 3rd-party extensions can have bugs. To get a list of all non-Apple extensions you have to go to the terminal and type the following command: ~ kextstat | grep -v com.apple.

You’ll get a (probably different) list of extensions as a result:

Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) <Linked Against>
   48    0 0xffffff7f8121b000 0x46000    0x46000    at.obdev.nke.LittleSnitch (3894) <7 5 4 3 1>
   49    0 0xffffff7f81a87000 0x3000     0x3000     com.rogueamoeba.InstantOn (6.0.2) <5 4 3 1>
   90    0 0xffffff7f81a60000 0x22000    0x22000    com.rogueamoeba.InstantOnCore (6.0.2) <89 5 4 3 1>
  100    0 0xffffff7f80fe4000 0x5000     0x5000     com.logmein.driver.LogMeInSoundDriver (1.0.0) <89 5 4 3>
  105    0 0xffffff7f807c2000 0x5000     0x5000     com.Cycling74.driver.Soundflower (1.5.3) <89 5 4 3>
  124    0 0xffffff7f82c01000 0x18000    0x18000    com.github.osxfuse.filesystems.osxfusefs (2.5.4) <7 5 4 3 1>

Try deinstalling these and test if your system stops crashing. If you’ll still get crashes, it’ll probably be a hardware defect. You can either try to run a hardware test or even better: contact Apple support.

Rafael Bugajewski
  • 187
-1

You are receiving a Spinlock acquisition timed out error.

Looking at the error, it shows Virtual Box and VMware Services. These two may be the culprits, but you can also see if you have any Safari extensions installed that may be causing the problem. But I would consider looking at VBox and VMware.

Sandeep Bansal
  • 6,452