MacOS – Upgrade to Yosemite: kextd close to 95% CPU

cpumacos

I just gave in to the App Store's constant nagging about upgrading to Yosemite. Aside from an unhappy Chrome, there is this kextd process that's constantly running close to 95% CPU. This results in the fan also running constantly and my battery being drained.

Things I tried but didn't work:

  • removed all the .plist files
  • upgraded to 10.10.1 when it came out this morning
  • called Apple support who had me delete a cache file (/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/kernelcache/loadedkextmt.plist)

The process doesn't start straight at boot, but maybe 10 minutes later during use.

How can I get this kextd process to quiet down?

Best Answer

I had this same issue and I found this message repeatedly on the system logs: com.apple.kextd[8095]: Kext net.semaja2.kext.insomnia not found for client path request.

Closing InsomniaX quickly solved the issue for me. Will do some more research on how to properly fix this in order to have InsomniaX running.

EDIT: After uninstalling InsomniaX and upgrading to the latest build the issue has been resolved.

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