Could the BigFix client cause Apple's Big Sur OS to Kernel Panic?

[TimRice]

@AlanM

I have a couple of our staff that are telling me that their newly upgraded Mac systems are Kernel Panicking and that once they got rid of the BigFix Client, it stopped Panicking.

Does this sound reasonable? They were both running v9.5.16.90

[straffin]

Hey, Tim!

I’m running the 10.0.1 BigFix Agent on Big Sur right now with no issues. From conversations with HCL folks, I believe that the newer Agents can will talk to older Servers without issue. You’ll likely want to get the latest macOS Agent on those Big Sur boxes, whether the Server is at that version or not.

[jgstew]

They were both running v9.5.16.90

You should definitely run the 10.0.1 BigFix agent on Big Sur regardless of root server version.

I have a couple of our staff that are telling me that their newly upgraded Mac systems are Kernel Panicking and that once they got rid of the BigFix Client, it stopped Panicking.

I don’t know why this would be specifically. I have run the 9.5 agent on Big Sur and did not have the same issue, but it is also NOT meant to be run on Big Sur. You should proactively upgrade all MacOS devices to 10.0.1 agent as soon as possible to maximize compatibility with Big Sur.

There will be a specific update to the BigFix agent for Big Sur soon, but 10.0.1 should be functional, even if not everything is fully tested and built for Big Sur yet. Once that update is released, you should also upgrade MacOS devices to it as soon as possible.

I am also running 10.0.1 BigFix agent on Apple Silicon on Big Sur using Rosetta 2 emulation. This does seem to work just fine, but the BigFix Self Service application is not working. A native agent for Apple Silicon and updates to the BigFix Self Service Application are in the works to address this, but that will take a bit longer.

[atlauren]

I’ve submitted an idea for an Apple Silicon-native agent.

https://bigfix-ideas.hcltechsw.com/ideas/BFP-I-152

[adinia]

Support for M1 added with 10.0.3 released yesterday

BigFix Agent now runs on Apple MacOS 11 with M1 chip!

Apple has recently introduced a set of devices based on a new chip, called M1. This is also commonly referred to as Silicon, or ARM64, from the underlying architecture. This is a big move, because for many years MacOS ran only on Intel x86-64 family processors, and Apple will progressively replace Intel chips on all new devices. With BigFix agent version 10.0.3, BigFix has added native support for MacOS 11 running on this new chip, without the need of activating an emulation layer. The instal…