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USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

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Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#101

Post by acdha »

freedomben wrote: post #59
spurgu wrote: post #21

The application window switching has been glitching ever since I was forced to upgrade recently[0]. Instead of switching between windows of the same app it (using the keyboard shortcut) sometimes includes windows of all apps . Rebooting helps. Sometimes it starts working again for some unexplained reason after a while. Super annoying. To be clear I'm talking about Keyboard shortcuts -> Keyboard -> Move focus to next…

I know this isn't helpful, but it's genuinely very surprising to me that this is the case with a company like apple that controls tightly the entire stack in part because they want to tightly control the experience, that you would not be comfortable upgrading to the latest version immediately. Particularly given how much of a premium you pay to get into that system. On Fedora Linux, upgrading has gotten remarkably sa…

I’ve been comfortable upgrading on day one for a couple decades, and have never had a problem. The difference in most cases is the areas where Apple doesn’t control – I don’t use a lot of third-party extensions but a lot of apps, even popular ones like Dropbox, used to do pretty invasive things which were prone to breaking. People in industries like audio production where much of the software has DRM systems have decades of scar tissue from that kind of stuff, so I totally understand why they hesitate.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#102

Post by dylan604 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #84
shagie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From 2020 https://www.securemac.com/news/arm-macs-faq > Write XOR execute (W^X) > Apple Silicon Macs will enforce a restriction called “write XOR execute” (W^X). This means that chunks of memory will be designated as writable, or as executable, but never as both at the same time. Many macOS apps contain performance optimization programs that require memory to be both writable and executable, but this can lead to seri…

The JVM has worked fine on macOS and Apple Silicon for years. It's not violating W^X. The problem is an undocumented/unannounced and probably unintended change in kernel behavior.

Shouldn't this help zero in on where the issue is located? If it did not occur in the last released beta but it now exists in the released update, doesn't that significantly reduce the footprint of where to search for changes?

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#103

Post by wasyl »

microtonal wrote: post #89
wasyl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not…

I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA, More likely neither. Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware. (My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.)

> Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

So every major OS update is larger and more complex, so it's to be expected that after ~4 of those my machine lags when doing literally everything? It's not that I'm running tons of background apps, it's a powerful machine lagging on a clean install of a recent macOS version when doing basic operations like opening a webpage.

> My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.

I suppose it's Apple Silicon? Because that would still be in line with Intel-based macs becoming less performant over time

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#104

Post by altairprime »

grodriguez100 wrote: post #95
altairprime wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End users typically don’t tolerate security fixes that alter or break existing functionality, so it would be in line with common responses for those ten screens of security concerns to be disregarded. One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice — and also is causing much of the drama everyone’s seeing. Presumabl…

> One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice The signal raised for page faults should be (and actually was , before 14.4) SIGSEGV, and not SIGKILL. This behaviour is even defined by POSIX. There is no reason why this should change, specially not in the final release instead of in the public betas and early acce…

To clarify so that I’m not responding incompletely, are we seeing all page faults, i.e. process swapped to disk, now raise SIGKILL — or is this behavior reserved only for certain page faults, i.e. out-of-bounds and permission-denied (R^X) accesses?

The former would be a catastrophic defect and probably result in the release being pulled from distribution.

The latter would be a new classification of certain kinds of page faults as “safe” and “unsafe”, and only the safe ones are allowed to comply with POSIX signal handling. Perhaps they’ll propose an update to POSIX now that the zero day response has shipped.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#105

Post by wasyl »

switch007 wrote: post #90
wasyl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not…

My intel MacBook lags in such a predictable and constant way, as if a process is running constantly at 99% CPU. Makes me a bit suspicious How much have they /really/ added to the OS (which is enabled on my hardware) and consuming extra resources?

A while ago I went into a rabbit hole looking for something to support my hunch (which I now confirmed by installing old macos) and found some discussions about graphics/OpenGL APIs being deprecated and removed over time. I have a very uneducated guess that new-macos-on-old-hardware runs some translation for all graphics operations/APIs, which causes perceptible lag when doing _anything_, because everything draws on the screen. It does feel as if the OS is constantly struggling with some background tasks

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#106

Post by porcoda »

This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#107

Post by prmoustache »

nebula8804 wrote: post #94
prirun wrote: post #20

My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago. I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Appl…

Sounds like Canon is really bad in supporting driver changes in subsequent OS releases. I recall diagnosing the same issue with a colleagues Mac over 10 years ago. She updated the OS and the printer she bought with the computer 3 OS'es ago stopped working. Turns out something with how Printers were handled changed and Canon refused to release updated drivers for a discontinued machine. I recall that some third party…

Regardless of Canon, there is no reason to change drivers between macOSX OS releases. Aren't all releases using cups?

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#108

Post by Rinzler89 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #94
prirun wrote: post #20

My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago. I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Appl…

Sounds like Canon is really bad in supporting driver changes in subsequent OS releases. I recall diagnosing the same issue with a colleagues Mac over 10 years ago. She updated the OS and the printer she bought with the computer 3 OS'es ago stopped working. Turns out something with how Printers were handled changed and Canon refused to release updated drivers for a discontinued machine. I recall that some third party…

Why? Windows has been the one updating itself making sure to not break backwards printer support, not the other way around.

You can still use printers from the 90's on modern Windows, meanwhile MacOS seems to break support for recent printers between minor updates.

It's not like they're a cash-strapped start-up, if Microsoft can afford to invest in maintaining backwards compatibility, so can Apple.

Sounds like Apple is just lazy and doesn't care what it breaks treating their desktop OS like their mobile OS where app devs need to keep pace with them, and fans will die on the hill defending them.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#109

Post by pxeger1 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #77
LeFantome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not accumulate a trail of old hardware. They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years. Their “tail” is always about the same length. I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days. It “just works”. So, a “long tail” of hardware is no excuse anyway. Apple is in the middle off a platform transition from Intel to their own silicon. Some of these pro…

>They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years. And people give Microsoft shit for not supporting Windows 10 more than 10 years when Apple only does 5. >I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days That's incredibly brave (or foolish) to have no fear of upgrading Arch, considering Arch does indeed break, it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.…

To be fair, with Arch, the more often you upgrade the less you have to fear - the migrations around breaking changes are normally pretty good.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#110

Post by prmoustache »

guappa wrote: post #60
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just saw an update come through on my Ubuntu 22.04 machine for CUPS. I know that Apple is the steward/owner of CUPS now, so I wonder if it's a related update.

Apple hasn't been paying for CUPS for a number of years now.

Apple is not employing Michael R Sweet anymore, that doesn't mean MacOS is not using cups.
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