VMware workstation 11 EFI hang

[bartvanl]

When boot sysresccd in VMware workstation 11 bios, all works well. But when i boot in efi mode, grub gets loaded and i choose an entry with keyboard. No matter what i select, the kernel boots fine, but when the command-line prompts, the guest hangs. Keyboard and mouse are not responding. However the cursor at the prompt is blinking.

When i check windows task manager, the vmx process is using no cpu, and Only 23M RAM. No disk nor network activity. Ssh and ping don´t respond.

it also happens with centos. I´m using VMware workstation 11 on a windows 8.1 pro 64 bit host. cpu is a intel i5 4570 with 16 GB RAM. I did verify checksum on iso and VMware installer.there are no other hypervisors active at the host.

[wila]

Hi,

Does your Sysreccd or centOS support booting via EFI? There's no version information supplied by you, so your guess is as good as mine.

FWIW, I wrote a blog post about using EFI with Fusion/Workstation earlier this week which you can find here: Boot via EFI firmware | PlanetVM

For your convenience I just also added a download to a small iso file on that same blog post that I used to test with.

If your guest OS is set to 64 bits and you boot from that CD you should boot straight into the EFI shell.

At least that should give you an easy way of testing if something is wrong with the EFI support and your keyboard itself.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[bartvanl]

I can confirm that your privided test efi iso works in the v, when booting from iso i get in a shell and the keyboard works. Sysresccd and centos state that efi is supported. Are you suggesting it´s an driver issue?

Edit: attached log when booting efi test iso.

[wila]

Hi,

I'm not sure, while I have some exposure to EFI, there certainly is a lot I don't know about it.

This was just a troubleshooting step on checking if at least the VM configuration works well with the keyboard when using the standard efi shell.

For the moment I think it is probably better to wait on the VMware EFI expert that also visits this forum and help you further.

Meanwhile it might help him if you can attach the vmware.log file from that VM to your reply here.

--

Wil

[bartvanl]

just attached log to my previous post.

[dariusd]

I guess I'm the EFI expert that wila referred to.  :smileyblush:

Thanks for the log.  I don't see any useful hints there immediately.  I'm waiting for the iso image to download here and then I'll try it out.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[dariusd]

Interesting.  It took me a while to reproduce this problem for the first time, and it took me a while longer yet to figure out how to reproduce it reliably: I can make it fail by moving the mouse in between the moment the Linux kernel starts and the moment the Linux kernel loads its PS/2 keyboard/mouse driver.

Does it work there if you do not move the mouse (or ungrab from the VM) for that period of time?

Thanks,

--

Darius

[bartvanl]

Thank you for looking into it. I tried that but it does´nt work. looks like the machine drops dead. No input, no network nothing. Really strange.

If you don´t move your mouse and wait till command-line prompts, then grab input does that work for you? Not for me! Are you able to ssh toward the vm? I´m not.

Message was edited by: bartvanl

[dariusd]

I can't ssh into the guest because there is no initial ssh password configured, but the guest at least accepts the ssh connection and warns "The authenticity of host 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)' can't be established.", etc., "Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?".  How are you determining the IP address to which you should connect?

I notice that you have some uncommon USB human interface devices attached to your host.  Unless you require those in order to operate the VM, could I ask that you try disconnecting them to see if their presence correlates with the problem?

Thanks,

--

Darius

[bartvanl]

Thank you.

Anyway, i´m suffering ALS. The exotic usb hid is my tobii eye-tracker device. I´m not physicly able to operate a mouse or keyboard. I´m not using the eye-tracker within the guest; it only works in windows.

But do i understand correctly: your keyboard and mouse also don´t work, but you´re guest still responds at nic? I assume you have no exotic usb hid´s. if the eye-tracker is the deal breaker, then i´m very dissappointed because there are no eye-trackers that work with linux. Maybe tommorow i can let someone unplug the device and test. That will be within 20 hours. I live in the netherlands.

edit: Just removed the usb controller from the guest. Still no difference...

Message was edited by: bartvanl

[dariusd]

OK, it would be a useful troubleshooting step to try without the eye tracker, but it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.  At this point I'm simply trying to figure out the variables which are causing the failure to occur there.

I have characterized one problem caused by mouse movement and have filed an internal bug report so that we can further investigate and figure out whether it is a problem with our EFI implementation not handing off the PS/2 mouse controller in the right state or whether it is a problem with the Linux kernel not being sufficiently tolerant of the PS/2 mouse controller not being in exactly the state it expects.  (Or whether it is another problem altogether related to the PS/2 mouse port or elsewhere in the software stack.)

I've actually worked on eye tracking gear before and I suspect (with moderate confidence) that it is indirectly triggering the problem, so I also suspect that fixing the aforementioned bug will get things working there for you.  Unfortunately, I do not currently have eye tracking hardware with which I can test.

And yes, when my VM is in this state, it does not respond to keyboard and mouse input at all, but it does respond on the NIC.  I booted the VM once without touching it at all, so that it obtained a DHCP lease and so that I could run "ifconfig" to grab its IP address, then I booted it again while moving the mouse to reproduce the problem, at which time I can SSH from the host to the VM's IP address and at least receive SSH's host key warning.  (It should get the same IP address when booted under BIOS, if that helps verify that you have the correct IP address for SSH...)  If I knew what password to use, I expect it would successfully log in.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[bartvanl]

thank you.

I have high hopes. Believe it or not, once i removed the usb controller from the guest it worked. Only once, i can´t reproduce it. The password get´s auto scrambled in sysresccd. You need to execute the "passwd" command. Then you can ssh to sysresccd as hostname.

Message was edited by: bartvanl I managed to "pause" the eye-tracker during kernel boot, so no keyboard or mouse activity get´s captured. After boot i can use the mouse and keyboard! I attached the log. In the boot menu i selected the option the boot in graphical mode, the open-vm-tools work out of the box. I think it has to do with ps/2 within efi. Could you please keep me informed?

[dariusd]

Massive thanks for that.  I'm now quite confident that we are chasing just the one issue and that we've got it well characterized.  I've filed bug 1372887 to to track the issue... Hopefully we'll be able to resolve it quickly.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[bartvanl]

Hi Darius,

Just received your PM. I cannot reply because i do not have enough points? Anyhow, i´m glad to help and looking forward to it.

[wila]

Hi,

Sorry about the "not have enough points" part.

This is something that has been implemented at the forum in order to stop pm spam. I wasn't aware that this has now been active on the site, it was discussed before in the moderators group.

You need to be active in the forum for a bit in order to get past this limit.

I will pm you Darius his email address, I'm sure he'll be fine with that

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Wil

[dariusd]

Thanks, Wil.  I had just PMed him my email address when you posted here. :smileygrin:

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Darius

[em2slyn]

Hi All:

I am using VMware Workstation 11 and am experiencing a similar problem where the keyboard input hangs when I boot a Linux VM using EFI. The problem is intermittent and occurs on two different computers running Window 8.1 x64 Professional. The problem is preceded by the error message "i8042: No controller found" which is displayed in yellow. It happens immediately after the boot screen (just following the Linux Penguin splash in the case of CentOS) just prior to the log in prompt. I'm primarily working with two different distributions of Linux--CentOS 7 and Debian 7.8--and have observed the problem on both systems. I cannot determine if VM mouse capture influences the problem since it happens randomly. Simply restarting the virtual machine from the VM menu often resolves the problem.

This discussion thread seems most relevant and the follow up posts indicate that a bug report was submitted. I did not see mention of the error so it seemed appropriate to at least mention it.

Shaun

[dariusd]

Hi all,

VMware Workstation 11.1 was released just now, and contains a fix for this issue.  Please let us know if you continue to encounter keyboard/mouse problems with EFI-booted Linux guests after installing this update.

(em2slyn: I can confirm that the "i8042: No controller found" issue is exactly what we have corrected.)

Thanks for your patience!

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Darius

[trboomer]

This is NOT FIXED! I am using VMware Workstation 11.1.2 and it does the same exact thing. It hangs. In my case my host is Windows 8.1 and the client is Windows 10 with EFI turn on. It works but it hangs all the time and when it hangs no other vm's can be used. UEFI is critical to me because I need it to test Windows 10 deployments using UEFI instead of BIOS.

[dariusd]

Hi trboomer,

If you are using a Windows 10 guest, you are encountering a different problem... The rest of this thread is for a specific problem affecting UEFI-booted Linux guests.   Please start a new discussion thread here in the VMware Workstation community, and provide as much information as you can to help us to understand and reproduce the problem you are encountering.

Thanks,

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Darius