Help needed: VM freezes/restarting host

[chapapa]

Hi everyone,

i have come across a problem i am not able to solve by myself. Maybe someone here can help me with figuring this out:

I am using a VM (Windows 7) with "older" games on different host systems. Lately i got hold of a Steam Deck and naturally i want to use this VM on this device as well. I installed vmware player 16.2.4 on the steam deck and moved the VM to the internal drive. Whenever i start the VM, it boots up fine and starts the start up routine. One of the first thing that happens is that Steam in the VM wants to update itsself, however it always freezes my host, becoming unresponsive and restarting itsself.

Some additional infos / observations:

1. VMWare Player 16.2.4

2. Host System: Steam Deck (Linux)

3. VM Settings: 1 CPU Virtualize Intell VT or AMD enabled, Virtualize CPU performance counters enabled, 4GB Ram, OS=Win 7 x64, Accelerate 3d graphics enabled, network bridged,

Here is what i tried so far:

1. Use older VMware Player 16.2.1

2. Disable write caching

3. Disable 3d acceleration

4. Change USB to 2.0

5. Disable Virtualize Intel or AMD

6. Disable Virtualize CPU performance counters

7. temporarily disable "khugepaged"

Attached you can find the vmware log from the vm. If you need additional information, just let me know. 🙂

Edit:

Two observations i want to share:

1. If i am quick and cancel the task steam.exe via the task manager (in the VM) the machine runs fine for a couple of minutes. the freeze will still get triggered by other events, for example starting a browser.. or a game...

2. After the involuntary restart of the host, bluetooth is not working in 50% of the times. A manual restart is necessary to get BT working again. ( I also deactivated the passthrough of bluetooth devices to the host, but the freezes still occur)

[scott28tt]

Your post needs moving so I reported it.

[chapapa]

I think i got it working. I changed the network settings from bridged to NAT. now it seems to work..

[ebsf1]

More of an off-the-cuff than definitive response, but I've been wrestling with this a bit and have gotten to tolerable behavior.

Overall, it's a memory management issue, which requires guest and host tweaking.

On the Windows guest, re-configure superfetch in the registry for boot only, not boot and apps.  This will keep superfetch from loading all sorts of stuff into memory, and will help reduce page faults / swapping.  So:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000002

On the Linux host, what's working so far is to set the following kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf:

- vm.swappiness=1

- vm.compaction_proactiveness=0

There are several other kernel parameters relating to memory compaction and memory reclaim that may be better suited but this is a quick-and-dirty that is working well in avoiding freezes so far.

[srrt]

Hi @scott28tt ,

Did you get any update ? I'm also experiencing it at both Ubuntu 18.04 , 22.04 and CentOS 7.  Btw my previously installed VMs are working fine, W2016, Centos7, Win10s, Ubuntu18.04...  something happened but dont know what 😞

My environment is 

Win10 20H2 + Workstation Pro 16.2.4 + i7 10850H CPU + 64Gig RAM

[scott28tt]

I simply reported the post so that the moderators of the Communities knew it needed moving to the correct area for Workstation Player.