Live data from Hacker News

Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

github.com

131–140 of 241 posts

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#131
post #115
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 y…

I dunno what you're whining about, I've had multi monitor setups on several mac laptops and they've always worked fine. Same on my desktop. Same on my work desktop. It's almost always more reliable than doing it on Windows.

Ditto as I commented above, but I’ve heard these reports from lots of technical and smart people leading me to believe there’s a real reason. As others above have mentioned it sounds like laziness on the part of peripheral vendors, but it’s a bit surprising Apple doesn’t have a workaround that makes this not crop up.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#132
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

More anecdata - late 2013 15” Haswell + GeForce 750m rMBP, have literally (and I really truly mean this) had 0 issues. Not a single kernel panic or notable userland software glitch. The only thing that glitches occasionally is plugging into an external monitor, but this has happened on every release since Mavericks (what this laptop shipped with IIRC)

I’ve had no problems with my MacBooks outside of what I’d expect (periodic smc firmware resets), but my wife had nothing but problems with the two nvidia MacBooks she owned.

It was a shame because they were, on the surface, basically the best thing since sliced bread for dgpu on Apple hardware, so you must have gotten a gem :)

Or she just got a few lemons out of the millions manufactured.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#133
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume a lot of variables come into play, probably what you use, how you use it, and where you use it. But it's funny you say that, because that dichotomy seems to define High Sierra; it's either a total mess, or totally forgettable.

I actually didn't have any problems with WinodwsME (seriously). It ran about the same as Windows98 ... I mean still buggy and would crash once a week, but that was the entire Win9x era.

98se2 was solid as a rock for me :)

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#135
post #32
post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!

Literally all of my issues revolve around display issues. I honestly don’t understand how developers at Apple don’t fix these things... If I am getting up/down from my desk throughout the day and plugging in and unplugging a monitor, sometimes my screen is just _stuck_ black and requires a hard reboot. Other times, it shows the login screen on both monitors. Yet other times, it decides it didn’t actually detect that monitor.

Most folks on my team have the same deal to differing amounts. We don’t use any special software.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#136
post #54

1. By creating and closing process very rapidly, one could easily reproduce this problem. I used something like `while true; do sh -c "exit 0"; done`. The entire OS dying to rapidly spawned/exited processes permits a pretty nasty DoS. Good thing that nobody ever uses macs as servers or shared machines.

Author of comment here: Doing this alone doesn’t do any harm unless running htop in background, also this only makes the bug happen more quickly. If one has Activity Monitor running prior to crash, it’s still possible to kill htop with it and would make OS useable again.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#137
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why we can’t have nice things--random reports of things not working are pretty meaningless without context No they are not. A lot of the same reports with same combination of htop + iTerm should prompt the company to investigate. At least when they are selling $2k "premium" machines. > I’ve installed htop many dozens of times using Homebrew on a variety of Mac hardware Neither did I except since I upgraded…

Even if htop doesn't work correctly, and is complete garbage it doesn't install kernel extension and doesn't run with admin privileges so it shouldn't freeze the machine or render it unusable which is seems to do. Turns out it doesn’t, but it’s not unusual for people to make these types of unsubstantiated claims; turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra. The Homebrew team updated the formula so it…

> Turns out it doesn’t, but it’s not unusual for people to make these types of unsubstantiated claims

What are the unsubstantiated claims? That these people including me are lying and have made this crash up? Do you really believe that?

> turns out it’s a build issue that conflicts with High Sierra.

Thanks for checking, but what is the build issue is exactly?

The original point was that unless htop installs kernel extensions or runs as admin it shouldn't break the rest of the system. So there might be an htop issue but there is most likely a macOS issue as well.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#138
post #3

High Sierra seems like a great OS if you want an unstable workstation that doesn't work with tools you've used everyday for well over a decade.

It’s weird, I keep hearing things like this but have encountered literally no issues with it on my mid-2015 MacBook Pro... Is there some particular hardware that it’s dodgy on or am I just lucky?

My suspicion is that it is to do with the set of third party software and peripherals used.

In my case, that’s a 2nd gen 15” touchbar MacBook Pro, a 15” 2015 MacBook Pro, and a Skylake i7 hackintosh tower. I use Asus and Dell monitors and stick to first party or Mac exclusive third party software wherever possible. All three give me little or no trouble with high sierra... reboots are infrequent (1-2 per month, sometimes less) and are usually done to install updates or boot into windows.

Re: Leaving htop running freezes macOS High Sierra

#140

From the symptoms, it looks like it’s starving the computer of memory. It doesn’t look like anyone’s debugged this, so once I get back to my computer I’ll take a look and get it reported to Apple.

After a Quick Reading of the issues it reminds me of an old linux Kernel bug.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mechanical-sympath...

Post reply on HN