Odd behaviour with Fusion 7 and Yosemite (possible mouse/OS X/fusion issue?)

[chrispee23]

Hello

I'm having a very strange problem with VMware Fusion 7.0.0 on OS X Yosemite running on a mid 2011 iMac.  It's quite hard to explain but basically two XP VMs (one migrated from earlier versions of Fusion and one created new under Fusion 7) become unresponsive until the mouse pointer is moved.  The mouse pointer doesn't need to be inside the VM, it just needs to be moving.  The issue is most easily demonstrated on the XP boot screen (the black screen with the Windows flag and small blue progress bar) whereby the bar simply stops moving until the mouse is moved.

I've tried a lot of troubleshooting, including:

1. Upgrading VMware Tools to the latest version;

2. Setting the VM compatibility to the latest and also back down to 6;

3. Stopping as many services as possible inside the XP guest;

4. Removing as many applications within the XP guest as possible;

5. Making sure App Nap is off;

6. Rebooting my Mac;

7. Uninstalling VMware tools in the guest and reinstalling;

8. Turning of troubleshooting and disk caching in the VM;

9. Creating a new XP VM.

All to no avail.  It seems there is an issue between OS X and Fusion but I'm only speculating here.   I've not had time to test other guests but I will try to do that over the next few days.

I would really appreciate some pointers - I use XP for VB6 development work and, at the moment, it's effectively unusable.

Thanks

Chris

[dariusd]

You've bumped into an Apple bug, affecting all hypervisor programs running on Yosemite on mid-2011 iMacs.  Apple is aware of the issue.

You can work around it by opening Terminal, and running the following command:

   sudo nvram boot-args=debug=0x10

Then, restart your Mac.  Fusion should then perform normally.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[chrispee23 · Accepted solution]

That is amazing!  Just tried it and it seems to have resolved the problem.

When I posted I was hoping someone would reply with "oh, just do xyz and you're done" - I didn't think anyone would though :smileysilly:

Thanks again! :smileyplus::smileyplus: