Topic: HDSPe and Multiface causing random crashes in El Capitan
After more than ten years of using my original Multiface, first with a cardbus card and later with an HDSPe card, without any problems, I've recently run into a serious issue. I'm on a 2007 Mac Pro 2,1 8-core 3GHz machine, and was using the Piker Alpha boot loader to run OSX 10.10 Yosemite with no problems. However, after recently updating to El Capitan (the last version that will ever work on my machine even with the boot loader) in order to be able to run the latest version of Logic Pro, my machine started crashing often and seemingly random.
At first I was suspecting RAM problems or a corrupt update, but after trying a clean install with the same issues as well as repeated testing with two RAM chips removed at a time, I still had the problem.
The screen just freezes up for a second, then it goes black and the machine reboots. Once I reach the desktop I get a notification that the machine did not shut down properly, a question about if I want to restore what was running, as well as a crash report.
The crash report always look mostly the same, except that the currently running task varies. Sometimes, it's that dropbox was running and rsync was the process, sometimes it's just the kernel, I think there have been five or six different variations. From all my research, the most common cause with this kind of symptom would be bad RAM, but my tests contradicts that.
It was not until yesterday that I finally thought of removing the HDSPe card, and voila! No more crashes.
Now I have the card back in, but with the HDSPMADI.kext disabled and moved to the desktop, and everything is great - except I can't use my multi face :-(
When I put the driver back and reboot, the crashes start to happen again.
Sometimes the machine runs fine for hours, even for a day if it's just idle, but eventually, it reboots. I can usually trigger it by syncing a bunch of files on dropbox or running a backup with Carbon Copy Cloner. Sometimes it will crash within minutes, or sometimes a few hours will go by. When I work in Logic Pro, an hour won't go by before it crashes.
I've searched the web and this forum for anyone with a similar problem but found nothing so far. Is this a known issue? Any fix, perhaps using an older driver?
Thanks in advance!
