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Worrying Mac panics early in the morning

I leave my iMac Pro running overnight, but since getting macOS 10.15.6, on several mornings it’s shut down by itself. It shows a report about a panic — is its power supply failing?

Although the root cause could be a hardware problem, it’s unlikely to be in its power supply. These are kernel panics, and the explanation should be in the panic logs which you see when it starts up again.

The Catalina 10.15.6 update introduced a serious bug, with a memory leak occurring in kernel “zone” memory. This is most obvious when running a VMware or VirtualBox virtual machine, but has affected many other systems. Over a few days, the kernel runs out of memory in these special allocation zones, causing it to progressively shut down services until all it can do is panic. Activity Monitor isn’t helpful because this doesn’t show up there, and you’d have to use the zprint command in Terminal to see the leak.

Normally kernel panics cause a Mac to restart, but sometimes they shut down instead. The panic log