I have been working with an Inspiron 6000 running Libranet Gnu/Linux(Debian 3.1 with some admin
tools and some other software added) and with kernel 2.6.14-2. I have made sure that I am
in performance mode and have used gkrellm (compiled from latest source) and the gkfreq plugin
to monitor the frequency. It is at 1600 mHz continuously and I have a 1.6 GHz Pentium M CPU.
Also the real-time clock is rtc not genrtc. Currently I'm not concerned with poor time keeping in
the W2K guest-later on that one.

I am using Workstation 5.0 with a W2K guest at SP2. Boot and shutdown times are
very slow. Also opening any application takes many seconds. I have my W2K desktop set to
open apps with a single click. When I single click on an icon, nothing happens for many seconds
but finally the selected application will open. Also the cursor is often missing in text dialogs,
such as the login dialog, as well as sometimes in a command-prompt window. In the later the
cursor comes and goes based on what has been done in the window.

Run-time performance of my applications, at least those that do not write much to the screen,
appears to be unaffected. However, I can type at the command line faster than the system
can keep up. Even during login, typing the password has the asterisks one or two characters
behind the key being struck. I have never seen this behavior before. Its like the refresh operations
on the screen are orders of magnitude too slow. But compute intensive and even disk I/O
intensive operations complete as I expect!?

The really strange result is that I can speed the boot process to nearly what I have had on
my previous laptop, an Inspiron 8100, by resizing the Vmware window continuously during the
boot process. The same works for shutdown. Also when W2K is finally up, double clicking on an
icon will bring the application up immediately. In fact the second click can be any place on the
desktop(outside of another icon or command-prompt window). The other characteristic that
is strange is that the task manager shows 100% CPU use on W2K even with the most minor
operation. At the same time gkrellm shows essentially zero CPU on Linux. This occurs outside
of CPU intensive applications. Examples, are opening and closing Explorer, loading Internet
Explorer, etc. The mouse pointer shows the hourglass for a long time after the app is open.
Sometimes just clicking on the desktop clears the hourglass!

It seems to me that something is amiss with interupt handling or with the W2K graphics being
starved for CPU cycles. I was using APCI and not APM. However, I have just recompiled
the kernel using only APM and Vmware is back! The bootup and shutdown are like they should
be, a single click on an icon brings up the app rapidly, etc.

The CPU appears to be running at full speed always with no way of reducing it. The centrino
cpu frequency scaling system appears to depend on APCI being present.

Thus ScatterBrain and other posters with similar problems might want to try recompiling the
kernel using APM and not APCI. Perhaps there is a kernel boot parameter that will fix the
interupt handling with graphics that seems to be at the root of the problem. My BIOS is a bit
out of date, at A07 and with A09 available. The A08 BIOS update mentioned some changes
to the video BIOS, but I'm not sure that is related to the current problem. My video card
is an ATI M22 (Radeon Mobility M300) according to lspci.

This fix comes at the cost of some other functionality. Hopefully there is a fix via a boot
parameter for the problem with APCI on this latptop.

Delbert Franz

I don't have performance problems with Ubuntu, but the dmesg-messages were familiar and there is a bug opened:

https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17569

to quickly fix the issue, run "sudo /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup stop"

Canada, eh?,

I have exactly the same problem and - coincidence or not - with a Dell laptop too (D505, Centrino 1.7GHz, 512MB, XP+SP2). I installed an XP guest on an XP host and every 3..4 seconds the guest freezes. I have also tried: with ot without VMware tools, reinstalling the guest, reinstalling VMware, reinstalling the host, disabling speed stepping, fixed the timing, disabling DVD, USB, PCMCIA controller and the WiFi. No use at all.

And it is very annoying because:
1. I watched the performance of both machines (host and guest) at high speed. During the freeze time, the CPU used by the vmware-vmx process on the host drops to 0 (leading to almost 99% idle), while in the guest the task manager freezes too, but when it comes back it looks like nothing has happened;

2. Because of these "freeze points" the Windows input events are incorrectly processed: some keys input from the keyboard are lost, some keys input from the keyboard are duplicated, some mouse clicks - or, more specifically, mouse button ups or downs - are lost. This mouse behaviour results into a very, very ugly Windows behaviour: clicks are forgotten, clicks become drag-and-drop, drag-and-drops can't be completed, and many other.

Beside this... the guest works Ok and the host is not influenced of such problems.

Loading the host OS didn't affect anything. (I used the search tool in Windows to load the OS.)

However, looking at the VM's log file I found the following messages:
============================================================
Jan 03 11:10:21: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.061 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:24: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.079 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:24: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.078 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:24: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.078 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:24: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.059 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:24: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.056 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:27: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.126 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:27: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.068 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:27: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.059 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:27: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.059 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:30: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.125 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:30: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.116 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:30: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.116 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:30: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command READ(10) took 1.116 seconds (ok)
Jan 03 11:10:30: vmx| SCSI0:0: Command WRITE(10) took 1.106 seconds (ok)
============================================================

This is interesting because it coincides with the "stalls" on my guest OS. Every 3-4 seconds it stalls for a second.

Does anyone know what this message means?

I have this problem as well using suse linux 10 on a fujitsu laptop (so its not just dell machines). I have also found that the problem only occurs when I run vmware on a linux host (and not on a windows host).

I've found two ways to work around it.

1. set noacpi as a host kernel boot option
2. set the scaling govenor to performance and put a load on the host machine. I run a do nothing shell script at nice 19 to provide a load to the machine while running vmware, since turning off acpi breaks too many things.
while ( true ) ; do a=$a; done

As I understand the problem (and I could be wrong) there is a problem with the idle task using C3 sleep states, hence putting a load on the system keeps linux from scheduling the idle task and vmware runs much better (well at least for me).

There is a caveat about my machines acpi support, I have not been able to successfully recompile its dsdt, because it has several errors in it that I haven't been able to figure out how to fix yet.

kl1278 has posted another solution (setting max_cstate) in this thread http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=312185&#312185 it requires root access and setting the scaling governor to performance but it works better for me than the busy loop (the fan isn't constantly on now).

Doesn't look like that...

This is a strange problem. One Virtual Machine I have solved this issue by itself. It just started working as it should for some reason. But, sad to say, after I restarted that VM everything was as before again...

skr,

What host OS are you using?