Watchdog kernel panics in M1 Macs running macOS X Monterey (version 12.1)

I set up a brand new MacBook M1 this week; I was excited to potentially return to Macs after years of being on Windows machines, but my machine immediately started having kernel panics after the display would turn off. The kernel panics reported “userspace watchdog timeout: no successful checkins from com.apple.WindowServer in 120 seconds”. A web search for watchdog and kernel panics indicates that this problem is a common one, and has been an issue since at least macOS X Catalina (version 10.x).

A user on MacRumors reported that once he switched from SMB to AFP, his problems were resolved. This was interesting because my machine would only panic and reboot if I were doing active copies to a NAS via SMB when the screen turned off. I switched my share acess from SMB to AFP and haven’t had a kernel panic since.

I’m glad that I seem to have found a solution quickly (I hope it stays stable!), but to have such instability in a new machine for something as common as accessing SMB shares is not a great welcome back to the Mac ecosystem.