Friday, April 30, 2021

Catalina Security Update 2021-002 Breaks OpenCL

Gus Mueller (tweet):

Core Image, another framework by Apple and one that Acorn relies on heavily, uses OpenCL to process images when its renderer is set to “software” mode (the other mode is to use the GPU). Core Image tries to use OpenCL and then fails, so all images come out empty.

The quick fix is to tell Core Image not use the software renderer, and then Core Image will move everything to the GPU for processing and use Apple’s Metal framework instead of OpenCL — for most cases. I think there is still hardware out there that can’t use Metal, so it might fall back to OpenCL in that case.

[…]

Nothing in the release notes for the security update mentions OpenCL. I’m baffled and completely in the dark as to what the changes were or why they were done.

Colin Cornaby:

Also spent the morning diagnosing this. Catalina Macs suddenly stopped completely tests successfully, traced the timing back to the security update.

In our case, OpenCL breaking also breaks parts of CoreImage.

Previously:

Update (2021-05-07): Mr. Macintosh:

Catalina 2021-002 & Mojave 2021-003 Security Updates are causing boot problems on the iMac Pro.

After installing the update, some users are getting a prohibitory sign.

Update (2021-05-25): Gus Mueller:

Good news, Apple released Security Update 2021-003 Catalina yesterday for 10.15.7, and it appears to have fixed the regression which broke Acorn 6 and below.

5 Comments RSS · Twitter

Doesn't Catalina requipre a Metal GPU anyway?

Does this affect Mojave as well?

I've never seen a company mess up basic security updates so often. Most of the Mojave security updates last year broke basic parts of the OS. What happened to painting the back of the fence?

I am really surprised will all these updates breaking a lot of thinks, I did not notice this in previous OS versions.
Will somebody explain why are we getting this issues with the latest Mojave and Catalina updates ?
I do appreciate a feedback I am trying to get a stable OS on my retina MacBook Pro.

The latest "security" update also breaks the iPad-to-Mac-via-usb connection. Tells me I have to load some (unnamed) software to be able to do this again. Not much fun these days.

Latest Adobe CCs Photoshop isn't working properly, either, crashing with thread GPU-Sniffer. Everything's fine upon reboot, but when closed and opened again at later time, it crashes immediately, and repeatedly. Fresh install with both macOS and CC works fine until the latest Security Update is added. With Apple deprecating OpenCL and moving towards its Metal API it seems time for Adobe to move on as well?

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