Ubuntu 20.04 sometimes freezes when shutting down Windows VM

[SingingBear]

Hi,

I'm running VMWare Player 16.1.0 on Ubuntu 20.04, using a Windows 10 VM. Normal Windows shutdown takes about 10 to 15 seconds.

But sometimes shutting down Windows makes Ubuntu freeze slowly. At the beginning it is still possible to switch between browser tabs, but after about 20 seconds that is impossible, but scrolling still works, and so on. After about a minute or so the whole Ubuntu system is frozen, only the mouse cursor still can be moved, but clicking doesn't work anymore.

This happens at least three times a week.

Does anybody have an idea why this happens and what I can do to avoid it?

Tia Rolf

[funk4food]

I actually had no problem installing the latest release of VMWplayer in kubuntu 20.10.

I didn't download the .bundle file but I followed the directions found on this site .

The installation went smoothly, no errors. But in using the program I then encountered those problems I have described. As I said I virtualized an installation of kubuntu 21.10 beta and I had big problems, so serious as to prevent me from completing the installation and update of 21.10. The latest hangs irreparably devastated the virtual machine disk. I would venture that perhaps the malfunction could be due to a disk anomaly, but of course these are just guesses. What is certain is that the system, in the space of a few seconds, has gradually stopped working. Initially the mouse pointer moved but clicks had no effect. Sometimes some menus were opened, for example, but immediately afterwards it stopped working and the whole system (including the host) was totally blocked. The disk led indicated total inactivity. After restarting the pc for the umpteenth time, I then installed virtualbox. With it I was finally able to install and update 21.10 without problems, and then I used the same vmdk disk created by virtualbox, on VMware player. What can I say, the VMware virtual machine with the disk created in Virtualbox at the moment seems to work, but I haven't had time to seriously test it yet. About my hardware: i7 6700, 16Gb ram, RTX2060. In a previous Kubuntu installation (20.04 LTS) I used VMplayer 16 without any problems with windows 10 guest.

[RaSystemlord]

@funk4food 

Yeah, hard to say where the actual problem is. As I stated before, installing 21.04 failed on my particular physical system and thus I cannot test the scenario any closer.

Candidates for the problem that you have:

- Kubuntu 21.04 does not work very well with VMware. 21.04 is not a LTS-version and thus this could be more than just possible. However, it seems to have the same series of a kernel than Kubuntu 20.04 LTS, which does work ... which makes this choice more speculative

- the matter than a 21.10 VM would cause problems to your Host, is also speculative. The idea is that this kind of transfer of a Guest problem would move to the Host, should in theory never happen. Still, we know that sometimes it is the case

- random problem. Not sure what that random would be, a disk problem should not cause the symptoms that you have

- your source for Kubuntu 21.04 system produces a different result. I always use .bundle from VMware Site. By the way, I did not install any VMware Tools for my 21.10 Guest, because everything, including window resizing worked just fine without any Tools ... this is not the case always, but with Kubuntu 20.04.02 Host this seems to be the case normally.

As a more far-fetched problem:

- you have an incompatibility with your graphics card with Kubuntu 21.04 Host. That will cause problems all over the user interface, which you seem to have AND it does affect both Host and Guest.

Actually, the latter is what I had initially with Kubuntu 20.04 on my system, which has a entry-level good, nVidia graphics card, but of course rather old. Kubuntu was just choosing automatically a wrong (closed) display driver - much too new to be supported by the card. Solution was to manually change the driver for an old, supported choice (which has automatically stayed to be used, so, no further problems). If I remember correctly, the right graphics driver version could be changed from the user interface of Kubuntu Settings, once you get it up and running without the too new a driver.

Your experience using VirtualBox as an aid, doesn't really support this far-fetched problem scenario.

[redsolja]

Got the exaxt same issue with arch linux one year+ now.

I was thinking it was related to the graphics, but I am not sure as I cannot reproduce it easily.

I have had the issue in 2 laptops, one with dell latitude i7 and intel only graphics and one amd asus zephyrus g14 with hybrid mode graphics (which afaik only uses the cpu gpu)