CentOS 6.4/6.5 Console Freeze Problem in VMware Fusion

[tarball]

I am having a extremely annoying problem with using CentOS 6.4+ in Fusion 6.0.2.

CentOS installs fine and more or less works ok, with one major exception.

The terminal keeps freezing until a key is pressed.

Usually, the first freeze occurs after it has finished booting, but before the login prompt appears. It will just sit there forever until I press a key, then the rest of the login prompt appears along with the key pressed. This will then continue to happen at irregular short intervals (every second or so) and even occur in the middle of a commands console output. It does not freeze during the boot or shutdown process. Other OS's, like Vista, openSUSE 13.1, Mountian Lion all work fine.

I remember years ago with SuSE 7, 8 or 9.x (was very long time ago) I had a similar issue on a bare metal install that was resolved by modifying the boot loader options.

Does anyone know if there is an option to correct this in VMware Fusion?

Or since I'm very new to CentOS, what option in the boot loader to change?

[nancyz]

Welcome to the community.

Which version of CentOS 6.4 were you using, 32-bit or 64 bit? And which Mac OS X, Mountain lion or Mavericks?

[tarball]

Thanks for the welcome.

Problem with CentOS 6.4 64-bit, On Mac OS X 10.7.5 (Lion).

Configured as 1-Core, 512mb ram, 20gb scsi hdd.

It runs, just repeatedly freezes until a key is pressed. Even with the freezing, I did a yum update to 6.5. But since the problem persisted. I rolled back to the 6.4 snapshot.

Just as a note when running Mavericks in a vm with 1-core, 2.5gb ram, 40gb scsi drive it has no real issues other than iMessage not working.

[nancyz]

tarball wrote:

It runs, just repeatedly freezes until a key is pressed. Even with the freezing, I did a yum update to 6.5. But since the problem persisted. I rolled back to the 6.4 snapshot.

Could you attach a screenshot of the freezing as I could not reproduce your problem with CentOS6.4 VM + Lion host. Thanks in advance.

[tarball]

Sure thing. Here are a couple screen captures.

This one was after two ls -al commands and then clear to reset the screen.

The second capture is an fresh attempt to reinstall CentOS 6.4 64-bit in a clean default settings vm. You can see how it freezes even in the installer.

I've tried using different settings and compatibilities in the configuration for the virtual machine. All have the same result.

I've done a couple more tests to gather more information.

Running the command:

while [[ true ]] ; do echo -n " $count"; (( count++ )); done;

Does exactly what it is supposed to. Repeatedly displaying an incrementing number to infinity or killed. This does not freeze. Although, sometimes it will freeze when ^C is pressed to break the loop.

Also, even when the console is frozen. The virtual machine still responds to an outside ping request at the same rate.

I could be wrong, but it appears that the freezing may be caused by polling the keyboard to see if any keys have been pressed.

[tarball]

I'm mobile now and have limited bandwidth.

However, I logged into my Mac at home and created a new CentOS 6.4 fresh install on a different Mac Running Lion & Fusion 6.0.2. It has the same issue.

So, I compressed that Virtual Machine and uploaded it to one of my hosting plan servers.

It is about 450mb and available at http://lnxod.com/centos.vmwarevm.tgz

Would it be possible to see if that you have the same problem with that vm.

The easiest test is to just perform repeated ls -al commands. I've never seen it go more that 5 or 6 times without freezing. So, a dozen tries should be sufficient to see if it is the in the vm or with Fusion.

root user password is just linux1

[fromans1]

I have a very similar problem with CentOS 6.5 on my MBP with Fusion 6.0.2. The server is able to install but upon reboot (or any cold boot) it freezes right after the boot loader countdown gets to 0. Unfortunately pressing keys does not move forward for me like it does for you. I've found that if I suspend the frozen VM and then resume it I get a login screen. I've tried installing it two ways: base server and minimal install, but both times I get the exact same symptoms. I don't know why this is, but at least I know if I reboot the server I can suspend/resume and get a login. I hope we can find a resolution for this.

[Jose_Cardoso]

Having the exact same problem with Fusion 6.0.2, Mavericks 10.9.1 and CentOS 6.5 Minimal. I've even tried different hardware profiles (RHEL or CentOS) and different install strategies but all with the same result.

Strangely the VM isn't actually frozen. It is running quite happily just unable to update its console output. You can see this by simply sending it a guest CTRL-ALT-DEL sequence and watch it happily reboot into exactly the same stalled console output.

Thankfully your suspend/resume solution also works for me so I'll have to use that until VMware fix this odd bug.