Have you been able to update an existing lightweight macOS Virtual Machine on Apple silicon to Sequoia 15.4? So far, I’ve had three failures ending in kernel panics, and no successes. Maybe I’m holding it wrong?

Good news …

I’ve had no problems updating VMs from Sonoma 14.7.4 to 14.7.5, or Ventura 13.7.4 to 13.7.5. Those updates went quickly and without a glitch, but Sequoia has been another matter.

… bad news

I’ve now tried to update from Sequoia 15.x to 15.4 with three different VMs:

• freshly installed 15.2
• freshly installed 15.3.2
• lightly used 15.3.2.

None of them had iCloud enabled, but they were each fairly standard in other respects, and all running in Full Security mode, in my virtualisers Vimy and Viable.

Each has failed early, just a minute or two after the update started to install. That was terminated, and the VM briskly rebooted back into its existing version of Sequoia. Shortly after logging back in, they displayed the panic alert.

One VM was so sick at that stage it couldn’t go any further, so had to be humanely destroyed. However, I managed to capture panic logs for the other two. In both cases, the panicked task was com.apple.Mobile, with com.apple.iokit.AppleVirtIOStorage(1.0) at the top of the kernel extensions in the backtrace. The panic occurred on different cores, and its cause was given as “Kernel data abort”.

And a more innocent bug

In the course of looking at this, I happened to notice that creation dates of files in Shared Folders were all incorrect, giving a standard date of Monday, 1 January 2001 at 00:00. All other creation dates in VM folders, the SSV, and even in iCloud Drive folders, were as expected, but none of those in Shared Folders.

However, when any of those mis-dated files or apps were copied into the VM’s local storage, the expected date of creation returned like magic.

I have checked this in VMs running 15.2, 15.3.2, 15.4, 14.7.5 and 13.7.5, and it’s identical in every one. I suspect this may have been going on for some time. Am I holding this one wrong too?

Over to you

• Have you been able to update a Sequoia VM to 15.4?
• Are file creation dates wrong in your VM’s Shared Folders?

Postscript

Thank you all for your responses. I’ve now confirmed that failure to update to 15.4 appears confined to M4 models, and doesn’t afflict my MBP M3 Pro at all. However, the shared folder creation date bug seems just the same there.

Further news

This appears to be unaffected by macOS 15.4.1. However, I’ve discovered that persistence can pay: when a VM panics back into the earlier version of Sequoia, try it again. Sometimes it goes on to complete the update without panicking again.