Involuntary reboot log 10.16

On opening lid, password prompt was behaving as though Karabiner-Elements SpaceFN layer was jammed on. That is, if I hit "j", "k", "i", "l" etc (qwerty positions, that is), I could see the cursor moving left, down, up, right, respectively (where "down" moved the cursor to the end and "up" moved it to the start). But the space bar wasn’t jammed down; I could type spaces. I tried to kill Karabiner-Elements with Fn+Control+Option+Command+Z, but sadly it didn’t work… Hard reset. Upon rebooting I could see why the kill shortcut hadn’t worked: a pesky permissions dialog pops up asking whether it’s ok for Karabiner-Elements to control the Terminal app… sigh… I said "allow", but it may end up asking for those perms again in the future after any update (to the OS or to the app). Would be nice to figure out a way to do this without involving the terminal itself… This would be my most reliable machine by far if it weren’t for these Karabiner-Elements issues; looking at the list of 16 failures, as many as 10 of them look to be Karabiner-Elements-related. If it weren’t for those, we could have an average time between failures as high as 231.33 days, which would be spectacular (even with the keyboard-related failures, the current average of 86.75 is still not too shabby, and second-highest ranked machine out of the 13 machines since I started keeping records).

Statistics so far for this machine

  • Failure type: hard reset
  • OS version: 11.4
  • Uptime at moment of failure: unknown
  • Kernel panics: 0
  • Hard resets: 16
  • Total failures: 16
  • Start of recording keeping: 31 October 2017
  • Total days to date: 1388
  • Average time between failures: 86.75

Summary of events for this machine

  1. 2017-11-16: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep.
  2. 2017-11-16: spontaneous reboot on waking from sleep.
  3. 2018-07-15: frozen mouse pointer.
  4. 2018-11-03: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep.
  5. 2018-11-16: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep.
  6. 2018-11-18: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep.
  7. 2018-11-24: freeze half-way through passphrase entry on waking from sleep.
  8. 2018-11-24: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep.
  9. 2018-11-27: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep (even with Karabiner-Elements partially disabled).
  10. 2018-11-29: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep (even with Karabiner-Elements totally disabled).
  11. 2018-12-03: jammed keyboard on waking from sleep (because key repeat was not turned off; it seems the hook did not run).
  12. 2019-07-06: total freeze on waking from sleep, post-screen-unlock.
  13. 2020-06-22: unable to unlock or make backlight come on.
  14. 2020-12-03: some keys inoperative at lock screen.
  15. 2021-08-09: stuck at blank lock screen.
  16. 2021-08-19: SpaceFN mode jammed on permanently on at lock screen.

Historical data (all machines)

For comparison, previous generations of machines (from most oldest to most recent) that I’ve used have had averages of:

Active? Average uptime Total lifetime Log Model Description
~13.83 days ~540 days #1 — #39 PowerMac G5 personal machine
22.73 days 1,364 days #40 — #60 iMac (17", Early 2006) personal machine
20.06 days 321 days 2.x iMac (27", Late 2009) personal machine
19.11 days 707 days 3.x MacBook Air (13", Late 2010) work machine (Causes)
41.86 days 293 days 4.x MacBook Air (13", Mid-2012) work machine (Causes)
2.0 days 2 days 5.x MacBook (unsure of model) work machine (Causes), loaner laptop
27.176 days 462 days 6.x MacBook Air (13", Mid-2013) work machine (Facebook)
35.0 days 140 days 7.x as above, but with a replacement shell work machine (Facebook)
40.8 days 245 days 8.x MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015) work machine (Facebook)
87.0 days 522 days 9.x MacBook Pro (Haswell, Mid-2015, dual graphics) work machine (Facebook)
86.75 days 1,388+ days 10.x MacBook Pro (Haswell, Mid-2015, dual graphics) personal machine
n/a 844 days 11.x MacBook Pro 15-Inch "Core i7" 2.6 Touch/2018 work machine (Liferay)
33.0 days 66+ days 12.x MacBook Pro 13-Inch "M1" 8-Core 3.2 (2020) work machine (GitHub)