Application stopped working after upgrade to v14/15 due to system errors

[AlvaroPalmaAsteMicrosoft]

Description

An application that worked fine on MacOS13 Intel images stopped working after migrating to MacOS 14/15 images. MacOS14 was tested using both ARM64 and Intel images, MacOS15 was only tested using Intel images (ARM64 are not yet available on our environment).

• In MacOS14 it started throwing No space left on device errors.
• In MacOS15 it started throwing Cannot allocate memory errors.

A script set to monitor memory, disk and open descriptors usage in parallel with the execution didn't show that any of those resources were being exhausted. Also, local testing (although done in a MacOS 26 arm64 machine) couldn't reproduce the issue either.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions - Standard Runners
• GitHub Actions - Larger Runners

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• Ubuntu Slim
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• macOS 15
• macOS 15 Arm64
• macOS 26 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022
• Windows Server 2025

Image version and build link

• MacOS 14: 20251215.0069.1
• MacOS 15: 20251216.0081.1

Is it regression?

Yes, it used to work in the latest MacOS13 image (which was unfortunately deprecated in our pipelines)

Expected behavior

Work as it used to in MacOS13.

Actual behavior

• MacOS14: The operation couldn’t be completed. No space left on device errors received.
• MacOS15: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory errors received.

Repro steps

Please find attached the logs collected for both images (Intel ones). The application showing the issue is e2etests.

SYSTEM_LOG_MAC_14.txt
SYSTEM_LOG_MAC_15.txt

[shamil-mubarakshin]

Hey @AlvaroPalmaAsteMicrosoft, could you provide more info about your issue\project\application? Repro steps ideally. We won't be able to start investigations or provide much assistance without those.
With macos-14 Intel in Azure DevOps currently having 100+ GB of free space, disk space shouldn't be an issue for most scenarios. Unless e2etests is reporting non-OS related space issues or such

[AlvaroPalmaAsteMicrosoft]

Hello @shamil-mubarakshin

My app is a Google-test wrapping application. Unfortunately I can't share the binary.

This app used to work fine in the old MacOS13 images, but since those were deprecated in our environment, that env was migrated to use MacOS 14/15 images (and try to use the newly available ARM ones too). However, the new VMs keep failing with the described error messages (for both Intel and ARM), which differ between MacOS14 and MacOS15.

I can provide the ARM system logs if necessary, but they don't really differ too much from the Intel ones.

With macos-14 Intel in Azure DevOps currently having 100+ GB of free space, disk space shouldn't be an issue for most scenarios.

And indeed, in macos-15, the issue is different (Cannot allocate memory).

Is there something specific I should look in the logs that could help me clarify if my application is missing some setting required on macos-14 and above, but not in macos-13, for example? Some missing codesign on the app maybe? I think it's not possible to force macos-14 and above to use the same XCode version that was available on macos-13 (to discard that as a possible source for the issue)?

Thanks for your assistance.