ZoneCanary

ZoneCanary sits in the menu bar and watches the kernel’s zone allocator — the memory pools behind every kernel subsystem — for the slow leaks that end, days later, in a sudden panic.

A canary, not a crash report. A leaking kernel zone gives no visible warning until the machine panics with its memory map exhausted. ZoneCanary samples all ~420 zones on a configurable interval and flags a zone the moment it starts behaving like a leak — oversized, growing monotonically for hours, or both — while there are still days of headroom.

Green bird, or warning triangle. The menu bar icon tells the story at a glance; the popover lists active alerts, the largest zones, and an overall zone-pressure gauge showing how close macOS is to a panic or memory jetsam. A notification fires the first time a zone trips a heuristic, so a leak surfaces even if you never open the menu.

No root, no daemon. Sampling happens in-process through the same Mach interfaces Apple’s own zprint tool reads — no privileged helper, no subprocess, fully sandboxed.

A forensic record. Every sample lands in a CSV growth log, so when a zone does leak you have the multi-day trail a panic report can’t give you — ready to attach to a Feedback Assistant report.