Fusion

I am a long-time user of VMWare Fusion on x86 Macs.   I just bought a brand new M1 Pro 16" MBP and purchased VMWare Fusion Pro 13.

I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 20.04LTS ARM.  I chose 20.04 to avoid Wayland, which is the default for 22.04.

I am unable to change the display resolution.   The only resolution listed as available by xrandr is 1024x768.

I used xrandr --newmode and --addmode to add custom resolutions, but, when I try to change to them, I get:

$ xrandr -s 1920x1200
Failed to change the screen configuration!

It is actually like it might be a device driver issue.

Is there any way I can get additional resolutions supported?   On my x86b Mac open-vm-tools works great and automatically changes resolution when I resize my VM window.  I would really like for this to work on my new M1 Pro Mac!  If I can get automatic resize to work, just being able to change resolution manually would be good enough for now.

Thank you!

Jay

Ubuntu 20.04 aarch64 ships with a 5.4 kernel that does not contain the vmwgfx (VMware SVGA) driver which is required to change screen resolution in the VM. Open-vm-tools does not add this driver. 

Vmware donated the driver to the Linux kernel team in about the 5.14 time frame. Running a mainline (unofficial) 5.14 or later kernel should theoretically give you a kernel that has the driver. I say theoretically because kernels earlier that 5.19 that Ubuntu delivered had bugs that would not allow them to run under Fusion on M1/M1 Macs. 5.19 and later kernels won't run on 20.04 due to dependencies they have on package versions not present in 20.04.

My suggestion would be to run 22.04.1 or 22.10 - both of these are known to have the vmwgfx driver, work on Fusion 13, and are able to disable Wayland. You can disable Wayland and use X11 by editing /etc/gdm3/custom.conf, uncommenting the line containing "WaylandEnable=false", then rebooting.

From where you are with 20.04.4 installed, one idea is to upgrade that 20.04 version to 22.04.1 with standard Ubuntu upgrade processes. During the upgrade process a newer kernel will be installed that has the driver. Then disable Wayland.

If you're starting fresh, I'd start with the 22.04.1 LTS (daily builds) or 22.10 . These include the vmwgfx driver. See the Unofficial Fusion 13 for Apple Silicon Companion for download URLs for the 22.04.1 daily builds. The released installers for 22.04 and 22.04.1 have kernel bugs that won't let them boot on Fusion. 22.10 works out of the box.