Guest OS crashing on mac os 11.1 host

[Gepper]

Hi,

I have been using Vmware fusion free edition to play a little bit of Diablo 2 with a friend of mine online. It works fine most of the time, but then all of a sudden the host crashes with a Vmware window popping up offering me to restart the machine or gather some data. Typically when it happens once, and i restart - then it will happen again shortly and repeatedly.

Host OS mac os big sur 11.1, Vmware fusion 12.1, host OS tested: Windows 7 and Windows 10, happens in both. 

Tested changing different graphic setting, change version of virtual machine to version 17 etc. but nothing helps.

[scott28tt]

@Gepper 

Moderator: Please try and create a thread in the area for the product used - moved to Fusion Discussions

[ColoradoMarmot]

Do you mean the guest crashes?  If the host crashed, you wouldn't see the fusion prompt.

What's the physical hardware for the host, and what's the host and guest CPU, Graphics, and memory settings?

[Gepper]

Hi,

Yes the guest crashes. Host is a Macbook Pro 15 inch, late 2018, 2,9GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB. Guest OS Windows 7 / 10, 4 cores allocated, 4GB RAM, 8GB video RAM (also tried 4GB).

Tried both windows 7 and 10, tried different combinations of core, memory, graphic memory etc. Nothing seems to help.

I attached a log from today when it crashed around 13:32.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I don't recall that being the graphics card in that machine, are you using an eGPU?

And does that machine have 4 or 6 physical (not hyperthreaded or virtual) cores?  

[Gepper]

This graphics card was introduced to the late 2018 Macbook Pros, and no - no external GPU. The CPU have 6 actual cores.

[jowy]

I have exactly the same problem. The guest os keep crashing from time to time. I have CentOS guest machine and another Windows 2012 machine and they are crashing from time to time.

The host is an iMac 27 inches with 64 GB RAM, CPU i5 4 cores and external SSD. 

I checked your log file and it's similar to my log file , where this is a PANIC:

2021-01-31T17:32:13.534+03:00| mks| I005: SOCKET 1 (61) recv detected client closed connection
2021-01-31T17:32:13.534+03:00| mks| E001: PANIC: ISBRendererComm: Lost connection to mksSandbox

Please check my attached log.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Hmm...are these new VM's or converted from a physical machine?  If the latter, try a clean one.

Also try disabling 3d acceleration in the VM settings...maybe that high-end card has compatibility problems?

[jowy]

no actually they have been created since long time, before vmware fusion 12 and before also upgrading to Big Sur

I will try to disable the 3D acceleration and let you know.

Thanks

[Gepper]

New VMs created only for running Diablo 2.

Disabling 3D acceleration would defeat the purpose of running the machine for me and it doesn’t occur often enough that i can test the machine with it off.

[jowy]

I upgraded to 11.2 Big Sur

I tried the following on every machine :

->> (Display) I kept the 3D Acceleration, and I changed the display memory from 2 G -> to 8192 MB recommended (shared graphics)

->> (Processors / Advanced options)

1. Enable IOMMU (this has good benefit as well)
2. Disable other checkboxes (since no need)

Results: The 3 machines are still running continuously from 3rd Feb 2021 till 6th Feb 2021 without being crashed; i.e, keeping my iMac running always as a host machine.

I'll update you more on the results.

[gringley]

For MacOS, 3D is not enabled in the GUI.

Did you custom install VMtools 11.2 to the VMs?

Did you add/edit these lines to your VMX files?

;edit this line
svga.present="FALSE"
;add this line
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

[Gepper]

Hi,

All changes i made in the GUI. I checked the config, and i don't have such a svga.present entry, there are 22 entries total with svga in it though.

I have the latest VM Tools that is installed via the menu (11.2.5?), should i downgrade?

[wila]

Hi,

The AppleGPU vmx setting is highly experimental 3D metal paravirtual GPU support and only for macOS Big Sur guest OS's.

It is not a setting I can recommend if you are looking for stability... (or if your VM is running Windows)

--
Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

And only works on Big Sur hosts too.  I've played with it a little, and agree, definitely not stable.

[Gepper]

I got the apple GPU enabled and now the virtual machine hangs on boot, so no that wasn't a solution...

[jowy]

the old issue re-appeared my guests machines are crashing.

I have vmware fusion 12.1.1 and my CentOS 8 was crashed today and inside the log file I found:

2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| I005: SOCKET 1 (61) recv detected client closed connection
2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| E001: PANIC: ISBRendererComm: Lost connection to mksSandbox
2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| W003:
2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| W003+ The core dump limit is set to ZERO; no core dump should be expected
2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| I005: Backtrace:
2021-04-21T10:55:00.414+03:00| mks| I005: Backtrace[0] rip=000000010eef46af

[ColoradoMarmot]

It might be worth having apple run hardware diags on the machine.  There was a batch of machines with bad GPUs a while back.