vmware Unable to open /dev/mem: Permission denied

[matthewls]

My startup logs include:

UUID: Unable to open /dev/mem: Permission denied

Has anyone determined if this error is a problem?

Thanks,

matthew

Host: linux64 k3.17.1; guest: win764pro

[dariusd]

Fetching the UUID from the host is used to give us a reasonably strong indicator of when a VM has been moved or copied to a new location – We'll prompt the user if that has happened, and if the VM is copied we'll generate a new MAC and guest UUID to ensure that there are no conflicts between the old VM and the new.

The host UUID is one part of the information that goes into determining if the VM has been moved or copied, and we try to extract that host UUID from /dev/mem.  If the host OS permissions do not allow us to read /dev/mem, we will fall back to using the host's identifier (usually its IP address) as the key to determine the VM's location.

As long as your IP address is constant, there should be no ill effects from the message you are seeing.

Hope this answers your question!

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Darius

[matthewls]

Many thanks for you quick reply. Could you tell me how to grant vmware permission to read /dev/mem without compromising system security?

I'm asking because workstation can be very slow to start, can lock the desktop if I try to load 2 copies (or player and workstation simultaneously) that requires me to ssh in and kill vmware-vmx. The permissions may be irrelevant to this, and I forgot to mention this cause of my original question....

[dariusd]

On my (Debian 7) host, /dev/mem is owned by root:kmem, so you'd need to add yourself to the kmem group to have access to /dev/mem.  I think there are too many possible variables across Linux distros to be able to give a completely generic answer...

Can you share some logfiles showing the slowness and showing the situation where you need to kill vmware-vmx?  If you could post them as attachments (using the Browse... button below the communities editor), that'd be superb.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[matthewls]

Thanks again. The recent log is attached. What happens is the CPU usage spikes and the UI becomes unresponsive. I sometimes have to ssh in and use vmrun to suspend or kill the machine.

A quick looks shows many errors, so I'm going to peruse my .vmx file.

Cheers,

Matthew