macbook-fix-touchbar

Workaround for macbooks rebooting because the touchbar got hung.

On macbooks with a touch bar, sometimes the hardware of the touchbar will get confused and fail to respond. Usually you'll also see the touch bar flashing, or going completely black.

After 180 seconds the macos watchdogd will then conclude that there is a fatal hardware problem, and crash/reboot the system.

There are 2 curious facts about this problem:

• it doesn't happen while you're typing / using the touchpad
• killing the TouchBarServer resets the hardware and the watchdog

So the fix-touchbar script runs in the background, and every few seconds it checks:

• are we idle more than 60 seconds (not typing etc)
• in that case, restart the TouchBarServer process once a minute. (note that we also restart the ControlStrip process for good measure)

This seems to work. Most of the time, at least.

Install:

For a script that runs as a normal user to be able to kill the (root) TouchBarServer process, you need to add a line to the end of the User Specification part of the /etc/sudoers file. You can do this by running visudo as root and adding this:

ALL             ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pkill -x TouchBarServer

Note that this will enable any user on the macbook to issue the command sudo pkill -x TouchBarServer - which should not really be a problem.

Then, run these commands (as yourself, not as root) to install the script to run as a daemon:

cp fix-touchbar ~/Library/Scripts
chmod 755 ~/Library/Scripts/fix-touchbar
cp nl.z42.FixTouchBar.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
chmod 644 ~/Library/LaunchAgents/nl.z42.FixTouchBar.plist
launchctl enable gui/$UID/nl.z42.FixTouchBar
launchctl start nl.z42.FixTouchBar

Uninstall:

Run these commands as a normal user:

launchctl stop nl.z42.FixTouchBar
launchctl disable gui/$UID/nl.z42.FixTouchBar
rm ~/Library/Scripts/fix-touchbar ~/Library/LaunchAgents/nl.z42.FixTouchBar.plist

Then run visudo as root to remove the pkill line from the sudoers file.

Good luck!