mouse performance

[michael_neale]

Hi All. I am now a happy user of fusion (pre ordered, of course). Performance wise its very impressive (I am running fedora in it at the moment).

However, even though the performance is close to "native" the mouse movement is certainly not. For sure this is better then the reverse (ie fast mouse, slow system) but I am wondering if there are any tweaks or config settings I can try to improve it? Its just a little to jumpy and occasionally the pointer seems to "duplicate" momentarily - if it wasn't for that, when in full screen mode no one would be any the wiser it was a virtual machine.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[BP9906]

Did you install VMware tools in Fedora? If not, you need to go to the Fusion mac menu and click Install VMware Tools and then it should load an ISO. Then you just browse to the CD in Fedora and install the RPM file. That will install appropriate VMware drivers so the mouse acts accordingly.

Hope this helps.

[michael_neale]

Yes I installed VMware tools (I kind of assumed everyone would, as it isn't terribly great otherwise).

Are there some options for configuring tools? the mouse is driving me crazy.

[michael_neale]

I saw mentioned somewhere that there was a fix for a jittery mouse:

http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=667095

but searching the forum has yielded nothing (perhaps the search isn't that great - and its not that easy for google to crawl this type of news group).

Also, when idle and running linux, CPU sits at around 30% - is that normal?

[admin]

Yeah, the search feature is lacking - my solution has been to watch the entire forum and use Mail.app's search 😕 One thing to watch out for with the forum search is the date range - it defaults to only previous week.

The Tools config script is vmware-config-tools.pl

30% seems high, but it depends on what the guest is doing (did you actually verify the guest is idle via top or equivalent)? In an apples-to-oranges comparison, my paravirtualized Ubuntu install idles at around 3%. On the other extreme, CentOS has a known bug[/url] where it has a too-frequent interrupt timer, leading to high CPU usage when virtualized.

Which version of Fedora are you using? If it's a newer one, you may have to compile tools for your kernel.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=78309&messageID=611214#611214

[michael_neale]

yes I verified that the guest is sitting on about 1% from its point of view (using top).

Its fedora core 6 - I have installed the tools - I am pretty sure I did everything the right way - I am using the VMWare video card, drag and drop works etc (so I assume that means it is actually working ??).

Its really the mouse "stuttering" and the CPU that is bugging me - the actual performance of it is quite good otherwise, but because of the CPU action, it heats up badly (for a laptop !).

[michael_neale]

I haven't been ableto get paravirtualisation to work - I added the vmi ... line in the vmx file, but (according to the tips on the forum) I can't see that it is running (I can't find any doco on that stuff - only stuff I find by accident in the forum).

[michael_neale]

Hi All. After some more experimentation, I have been able to get the mouse to work nicely.

Now I am just left with the host CPU hogging while the VM is idle. Although from other threads this apears to the be #define for the tick to be set to 1000HZ (thanks to some bright spark who thought recompiling a kernel is a better alternative then a config option).

So I may rebuild a kernel, see how that goes (to get the power consumption down etc). Then I should be a happy camper (finally).

Thanks for all your help.

FWIW, I hope that some of the advanced options make it into GUI !

[Chip_Zero]

Hi All. After some more experimentation, I have been

able to get the mouse to work nicely.

Anything you could share about this for forum lurkers with similar problems? There have been a lot of threads about mouse problems lately...

[admin]

I believe the only currently shipping distro with VMI paravirtualization is 32-bit Ubuntu. Hopefully this will spread to other distros over time; you can also compile your own kernel with paravirt ops.

[michael_neale]

I switched to Single CPU, I ran vmware-tools.pl twice (making sure it compiled) - no experimental options.

[mvandergrift]

I had to use Steer Mouse on my OS X host system to get my mouse (Logitech MX Revolution) to work in a usable manner. There were significant acceleration issues, in both the guest and host OS, until I tweaked the settings using this application.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/steermouse.html