Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken - after migration to M1

[BigLynx]

I spent some time trying to find the solution to my problem but finally I am without success. Maybe it is not to perfect decision for Fusion but I migrated my Mac to the M1. In general everything works perfect besides Fusion. Fusion starts and informs:

New features are available for your virtual machine. To upgrade, power off this virtual machine and choose "Virtual Machine > Settings… > Compatibility".

OK

This version of VMware Fusion is for Intel-based Macs, but is being run on an Apple silicon based Mac via Rosetta-2.  See KB-84273.

OK

and error:

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

OK

and that's it.

Final discussion about similar issue points out permissions to /tmp. In my case it's like this:

ls -l /tmp

lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel  11  8 gru 00:39 /tmp -> private/tmp

ls -l private

total 0

drwxr-xr-x  115 root  wheel  3680 19 sty 22:27 etc

drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel    64  8 gru 00:39 tftpboot

drwxrwxrwt   87 root  wheel  2784 19 sty 22:26 tmp

drwxr-xr-x   35 root  wheel  1120 16 sty 16:21 var

Any ideas?

[scott28tt]

You do know that Fusion on an M1 can only run VMs with OSes that are for an ARM architecture, not OSes for an Intel architecture?

VMware have a tech preview release of Fusion which works on M1 Macs: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Fusion-for-Apple-Silicon-Tech/ct-p/3022

[dempson]

What you are trying to do is impossible. Virtual machines with an Intel-based guest operating system require the host computer to also have an Intel processor. The M1 is not an Intel processor (it is Apple Silicon, which is based on the ARM architecture).

No current or future version of VMware Fusion will solve this: it is impossible to run a virtual machine on a different processor architecture. (Doing that would require an emulator for a different processor and platform. VMware Fusion is not an emulator. Competing products like VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop won't help as they are also virtual machines, not emulators.)

If you need to be able to keep running your existing Intel VMs, you need an Intel Mac (if you don't have any macOS guests, you could also switch to VMware Workstation on a Windows PC).

There is a separate area of VMware Community for the Fusion for Apple Silicon Tech Preview. This would let you run newly created guests with an ARM-based operating system on an M1 Mac. The preview supports some variants of ARM Linux. macOS guests don't work at all. The Insider Preview of Windows 11 for ARM guests are unsupported but the community has managed to get it working with limits: Microsoft does not offer a licence which permits the use of the ARM version of Windows on Apple Silicon processors, therefore VMware cannot support it, therefore there are no VMware Tools for ARM Windows. Older versions of Windows are out of the question.

[BigLynx]

Thank you for the reply

Rosetta-2 is an Intel emulator for the M1 processor. I use many applications for Intel on M1 thanks to this emulator. Honestly, Fusion is the first Intel application that doesn't want to work with this emulator. Worse yet - Apple Support says Fusion works with this emulator. When you think about it, it seems unlikely, not to say even impossible. I will try Public Tech Preview.

[Technogeezer]

Apple Support is 100% wrong on this one, which is puzzling to me since Apple themselves says in https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment that Rosetta doesn't translate apps that virtualize Intel computer platforms.

I'm not knocking Rosetta 2. It doesn't do "emulation" in the strict sense. It does ahead of time translation of Intel application code into ARM instructions the first time you use an Intel app. Subsequent invocation skip the translation part because it's already done. Rosetta 2 actually does "emulation" or dynamic translation in very specific circumstances when dealing with workloads that have just-in-time compilers. It's all very seamless and performs well - that's magical.

Fusion is not a normal application. The GUI is about as normal as it gets. The rest of the hypervisor has deeper hooks into the operating system and hardware. It's also expecting to deal with Intel hardware. It has no idea how to manipulate ARM CPU features and instructions. 

Give the tech preview a whirl... but you might want to check out the following article I wrote that might be helpful Running Fusion and upgrading from an Intel Mac to an M1 Mac? Read this first. 

[Impala6]

What I cannot understand is that this worked on Friday, yet did not work today.  How can VMWare suddenly stop supporting me like this?

[ColoradoMarmot]

Fusion has never worked on an M1 machine under Rosetta.  Sounds like you must have a different issue.  Please start a new thread.

[Technogeezer]

And please provide details about your Mac, macOS release and Fusion release. And if any changes have been made to your system between when it worked and when you discovered it not working. (e.g. was a macOS update automatically installed in the interim).

[Impala6]

My Mac is using a 3.1 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 chip and is running Monterey 12.2.1 - the VMWarre Fusion version I am running is 12.2.3

[ColoradoMarmot]

This thread is about migration to an M1 machine.  

There are other threads about this (poorly worded) error message on intel machines.  Some of the solutions involve doing a full clean install, others find that disabling SIP, installing Fusion, then re-enabling SIP, correct it.  There are others in those threads as well.

[UnlimitedTech]

Hi @BigLynx 

The fix for me was to allow read&write access to the /tmp directory. It seems that vmware fusion gets installed as the current logged on user. Vmware fusion requires access to write to the /tmp folder and if that access is not there you can get this error.

Steps:

1. Open File explorer

2. Click on "Go" at the top taskbar

3. Select "Search for a folder"

4. Type in "/private/var"

5. In this folder you should have a folder called /tmp and /log. 

6. Right click /tmp and select "More info"

7. Press the unlock button and allow the "Users" group to read and write

8. Quit and reopen vmware fusion and test

Not saying this will work for you but it did for me. For whatever reason the permissions changed. I didnt get a chance to investigate further as to why the permissions were lost but i assume maybe an update or AV software.

Hope this helps,

Kind regards, Jonathan