Swift Fish Net

For some reason, every time I do a software update of OS X 10.5 Leopard on my dual G5, I get a kernel panic that freezes the system after the restart and usually before I even log back in. The freeze occurs quite randomly at some inconsistent time interval after booting the computer. The updates only affect my G5, as my MacBook Pro has never had this happen. While I have no idea about why it works, there is actually a fix for the problem, which so far has worked every time to get me back to a stable system at least until the next software update.

The solution is to boot into single-user mode (Command-S during start up) and run fsck. Interestingly, once in single user mode after one of these update crashes, I get a bunch of errors, can’ts, and and couldn’ts relating to AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement:

• com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement isn’t a valid mach-o (magic is cefaedfe)
• error mapping module file com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement
• can’t map com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement in preparation for loading
• Can’t determine dependencies for com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.
• Couldn’t alloc class “AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement”

Then I run fsck:

:/ root# /sbin/fsck -fy
** /dev/rdisk0s3
** Root file system
** Checking Journaled HSF Plus volume.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
** Checking multi-linked files.
** Checking Catalog hierarchy.
** Checking Extended Attributes file.
** Checking volume bitmap.
** Checking volume information.
** The volume Leopard appears to be OK.

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
:/ root# exit

The “FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED” suggests that something was done, and a second reboot into single-user mode no longer brings up the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement messages. Upon reboot, the problem is solved, and there’s no more freezing!

What is strange about all this is why I am getting AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement errors on a G5. AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement sounds like it should only be on present on a computer with an Intel processor. Yet it is showing up on a dual G5 Power PC!!! As far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with the hard drive. In fact, I have tried clean installs of Leopard OS X 10.5 on multiple hard drives, yet I always get the same problem that is fixable with fsck.