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jaspersimon
Contributor
Contributor

VMWare Fusion 13 CentOS on Mac M1 - kernel panic

Trying to get a CentOS 9 Stream VM started on my M1 mac with VMWare Fusion 13.0.1.

I'm using Packer to automate this process and get some volumes mounted and so on. Right now the installation fails before it even properly starts with a kernel panic. 

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I have reported your post to the moderators, asking them to move it to the area for Fusion.


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Technogeezer
Immortal
Immortal

Is the panic occurring on the host Mac or guest? Can you elaborate on the process you’re using in Packer to automate the installation of the VM within Fusion?

- Paul (Technogeezer)
Editor of the Unofficial Fusion Companion Guides
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jaspersimon
Contributor
Contributor

The panic was occurring in the guest.

In the meantime I've investigated the differences between vmx files created when building the VM with packer + Fusion vs with Fusion alone, changing things until the VMWare one also breaks and it appears that the network_adapter_type must be set to e1000e. Packer defaults to e1000 which results in the kernel panic.

The builder I was using that failed:

"builders": [
{
"boot_command": [
"<enter><wait>"
],
"boot_wait": "5s",
"disk_size": 64424,
"disk_adapter_type": "sata",
"memory": 4096,
"cpus": 4,
"guest_os_type": "arm-other5xlinux-64",
"http_directory": "http",
"cdrom_adapter_type": "sata",
"iso_checksum": "sha256:{{user `centos_iso_checksum`}}",
"iso_url": "CentOS-Stream-9-20230131.0-aarch64-dvd1.iso",
"type": "vmware-iso",
"usb": true,
"Version": 20
}
],

Adding this line did the trick:
"network_adapter_type": "e1000e"

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