VMware Communities
Ken_H
Contributor
Contributor

VMWare Fusion Could not open /dev/vmmon: Broken pipe

I'm not sure what happened.  VMWare Fusion was working after I upgraded to macOS Mojave and then some time later stopped working.  I'm getting:

> Could not open /dev/vmmon: Broken pipe

> Please make sure that the kernel module 'vmmon' is loaded

followed by:

> Failed to initialize monitor device

followed by:

> Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pip connection has been broken

I uninstalled VMWare Fusion including the manual cleanup as documented in https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1017838.

, emptied the trash, rebooted, re-downloaded the installee, reinstalled, and I still get the same errors.  I still get the error and, oddly, even after doing all all the uninstall and cleanup, Fusion still knows my license key. 

Any suggestions on where the problem is?

Ken

Tags (1)
7 Replies
Ken_H
Contributor
Contributor

I must have missed something the first time as I did the uninstall and cleanup again, rebooted, ran the Fusion installer and was prompted for a license key.  So far so good.  I'm at the "Select the Installation Method" screen and there's an option to "Import an existing virtual machine" but for some odd reason, It won't let me use my previous VMware file.  The option for "Install from disk or image" is to create a new virtual machine but I don't want that.  Ugh, this is so frustrating.

Reply
0 Kudos
Ken_H
Contributor
Contributor

Closing and restarting Fusion allows me to open my original virtual computer file but I still get the "Could not open /dev/vmmon: Broken Pipe" errors so it appears the uninstalling and reinstalling has no effect.  In addition, I've checked System Preferences > Privacy to see if there's a prompt to allow access to VMWare but there is none. 

Reply
0 Kudos
Ken_H
Contributor
Contributor

I upgraded to macOS Catalina and now Fusion is working.  The bad news is that my Microsoft Office is now dead.  The previous post for this problem was over 2 years old and it's frustrating that VMWare hasn't figured out a process for tracing through and fixing this problem without having to essentially reinstall both macOS and Fusion.

Reply
0 Kudos
RemekDantha
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same problem with VMware Fusion 11.5.5 and MacOS 10.14.6. There are a couple unsatisfactory ways around it:

  • "csrutil disable" from Recovery mode works to fix this, but the problem reappears if I do "csrutil enable" and I don't want to keep my Mac with SIP disabled.
  • Fully reinstalling MacOS 10.14.6 from Recovery also fixed this. However, that put me one minor MacOS security update out of date, so naturally MacOS wanted to update itself to grab that. Installing Apple's latest minor security update to MacOS 10.14.6 made the /dev/vmmon problem reappear.
Jalapeno69
Contributor
Contributor

RemekDantha thank you so much for posting this!!!  I did a restore of Mojave from the recovery partition (rebooted with command-R) and now my VMware Fusion is working again!!  It must be the latest security update from Apple that is causing Fusion some issues.

Thanks again.

Reply
0 Kudos
randybias_new
Contributor
Contributor

Pretty frustrating to download and install VMware Fusion and have it immediately broken.

RemekDantha
Contributor
Contributor

I finally figured out the solution that worked for me:

In a terminal window cd to the directory /Volumes/«your boot disk name»/private/var/db/ and list the flags of the contents using:

  ls -lO

Look for the KernelExtensionManagement line. It should have the restricted flag set. If it doesn't, VMware will fail with this cryptic broken pipe error.

To fix it, boot into recovery mode (restart and hold down ⌘R), open a terminal, cd to the above directory again, and set the flag:

  chflags restricted KernelExtensionManagement

Then restart again back into user mode.

Reply
0 Kudos