Snow Leopard kernel panic with mirrored RAID

SoftRAID has just issued an update for the 4.0 beta to correct a kernel panic bug in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (see my Snow Leopard review). The bug might be limited to dual CPU Mac Pros, and might only affect a software RAID mirror, but that’s not certain.

Here’s what the beta update indicates:

Further investigation showed that these kernel panics were due to a bug in the Snow Leopard kernel. We have reported this bug to Apple and their engineers are investigating it. Instead of waiting for Apple to release a fix for this bug, we have added code to the SoftRAID driver to prevent this bug from occurring. SoftRAID version 4.0 b11 includes this code.

Note that the bug is in Snow Leopard itself, and SoftRAID 4.0b11 includes a workaround. That’s real support— find someone else’s bug, and make it work anyway! Adobe should try that sometime.

I suspect that the problem is far more general, which might mean that reports of Snow Leopard kernel panics online are to be taken more seriously than random events.

SoftRAID is a great product, one I personally use and recommend, and version 4.0 is looking awfully good.