[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Clipboard overflows causing system crashes i...
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Ask HN: Clipboard overflows causing system crashes in macOS Tahoe
26.3 beta 2?
I'm submitting this because I'm not sure if something is wrong with
my machine, or if there's a kernel bug that can be reproduced on
another machine. I've been able to reproduce this issue on my
machine twice in a row. I have a 16-inch Nov 2024 M4 Pro MacBook
Pro for my job. It's enrolled in AppleSeed as part of our internal
beta testing. One of the tasks I'm working on is building an
IntelliJ IDEA plugin for our internal configuration system. As part
of an enhancement I've been working on, I've needed to get several
samples of PSI structures from the IDE. If you've worked with the
IntelliJ Platform SDK, you know these PSI structures can be
absolutely massive, especially if you need to copy and paste them
to save them to files. I tried to save one of these PSI structures
to a file so I could analyze it more closely. I pressed Copy PSI in
the IDE, opened Neovim in Ghostty to paste, and pressed the paste
shortcut... and my system locked up and hard-crashed. I tried it
again when I rebooted, and the system hard crashed again. I'm not
sure how long the actual string I was copying and pasting is, but I
know it's probably absolutely massive. The problem is that I can't
figure out if this is a Ghostty issue or a system issue. Ghostty is
fully up to date. Is anyone able to reproduce this issue?
Author : nhubbard
Score : 3 points
Date : 2026-01-20 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
| nhubbard wrote:
| Update: Several reproduction sessions later, it appears that the
| content of one specific YAML file's PSI structure is causing a
| negative interaction with the system's EndpointSecurity extension
| process. Either one of the AV products on my work machine or the
| EndpointSecurity extension itself are panicking when the
| Pasteboard daemon attempts to output the contents. My work's IT
| team is awesome, so they upgraded a testing machine to 26.3b2,
| ran the same test, and it was also affected.
|
| The issue was happening in Ghostty, iTerm2, and Terminal.app. It
| happened by (a) pasting directly into the terminal prompt with
| Command-V, (b) using `pbpaste` in any way (like piping it into
| `wc -c`), or (c) pasting into an editor like Neovim with
| Command-V.
|
| It doesn't happen with any other file I tested it with. It also
| doesn't happen if I try to paste into another app, like Visual
| Studio Code, TextEdit, or IntelliJ IDEA itself.
|
| Nothing is inherently wrong with the binary/text content of the
| file. It's all ASCII characters.
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(page generated 2026-01-20 23:01 UTC)