VMWare Fusion Pro 11.15.6 (16696540) causes macOS crash during disk shrink in Ubuntu guest OS

[DarkCloud14]

Hello,

I'm running macOS Catalina 10.15.6 (19G2021) and I'm trying to shrink the main disk of my Ubuntu VM.

I use the command "sudo vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /" and after a short time macOS crashes and restarts.

After the restart of macOS I see the following error in apple error report: "watchdog timeout: no checkins from watchdogd in 90 seconds"

I can also provoke this error when I use the following command in the Ubuntu VM "dd bs=1G count=20 if=/dev/zero of=./blanko" or when using zerofree program in the VM

It also happens with above dd command and a smaller count like 5 but executed multiple times after the command finishes..

I get this error on both my iMac late 2015 and MacBook Pro 2015 both have macOS Catalina 10.15.6 (19G2021) installed and VMWare Fusion Pro 11.15.6 (16696540).

In both cases (iMac and MacBook Pro) the SSDs are encrypted with FileVault and also all SSDs use APFS as filesystem.

Can anybody else reproduce this problem and if so does anybody have an idea howto workaround this to shrink the VM hdd?

BTW when shrinking my Windows VMs this doesn't happen but there I only tried the shrinking option when VM isn't booted, I didn't try the above command in a running VM.

[wila]

That's weird.

macOS 10.15.6 (19G2021) would mean that you already applied the patch for the kernel leak.

It would probably be a good idea to also mention what Ubuntu version you are running and the kernel version of that ubuntu VM.

Attaching the vmware.log file(s) from the VM and mentioning the time of the host crash might also help in diagnosing the issue.

You can attach the logs via the attach button in the bottom right of the reply window here.

--

Wil

[DarkCloud14]

You're right I should have mentioned the Ubuntu version + kernel version in my first post, sorry.

Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

Kernel 5.4.0-42-generic

As requested I've attached the vmware.log of the run I did to reproduce it using the vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink command.

macOS crashed at 23:21:07 but looking at the log it ends around 23:19:47 and so I'm not sure if this is helpful but maybe

you or someone else will find something else in the log that'll help.

I'll try this tomorrow again with a fresh installed Ubuntu installation to see if its just this VM that crashes macOS or if it can be reproduced with a newly installed Ubuntu 20.04.1...

[wila]

Hi,

Looked at the log and it does not reveal much in regards as to why it would crash.

As you already noticed there is no actual crash information in the log.

The VM configuration seem to be reasonable. Although I don't know how much RAM is in your host.

The one thing I would probably try with a new VM is to use SATA or NVMe instead of the LSI scsi device it is now.

As you're getting a crash on disk intensive operations, it might be triggered by the disk kernel extension and this would be a reasonable way of excluding that possibility.

Is there a .dmp file in the VM's folder? (That would be a crash dump file)

If none of those then you probably would have to search at the host logs in order to find more details.

--

Wil

[DarkCloud14]

Hi wila,

thanks for your help so far, unfortunately switching to SATA or NVMe didn't solve the problem.

The Ubuntu VM has 8GB of RAM and the host has 16GB RAM total so 8GB would be left if I start the VM for the host..

I also tried to decrease the RAM of the Ubuntu VM to 4GB but that didn't help solving the problem.

As I wrote yesterday, I created a new Ubuntu VM with a 120GB NVMe HDD, 8GB RAM and installed Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS, after that was finished I filled the hdd up to around 60GB, after that I removed all the big files that I used to fill the VM and used vmware-toolbox-cmd to shrink the disk again.

At first it looked promising but at around 80% macOS crashed again with the same error...

In the end I was able to shrink the original VMs disk by using vmware-vdiskmanager to shrink the vmdk after macOS crashed and then using zerofree again, I repeated this until all the free space was reclaimed and the vmdk was shrinked to the smallest possible size.

FYI I didn't find a crash dump file in the VM folder and unfortunately I didn't find any additional logs that would be helpfull in macOS log directories or the mac Console app which shows the logs..

I didn't try to disable FileVault to see if that might help and to tell the truth I don't really want to try that as I more or less shrinked the VM now even if it didn't work the way it should...

Thanks again for your help!

[RobertoD91]

I have the same issue.

possible workaround: reboot ubuntu in recovery mode, start a root shell and run 'vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink / '

[_Chris__]

I had the same issue and this workaround worked for me too.