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hiimnadya
Contributor
Contributor

piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled!

Hi,

When starting Ubuntu on VM workstation I get the following error: piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled! 

I've tried reinstalling the whole product, reinstalling VM tools and repairing VM workstation but to no avail; after the error, I keep getting a black display with nothing on it.  

Here's an image of the error I get: https://prnt.sc/gv4l0m

Hopefully, someone could help me out.

Thank you

1 Reply
dmaple
Contributor
Contributor

I get that too.  It is because VMware doesn't give the host a way to access the SMBus.  It isn't a problem because the system is virtual and you don't really need to interact with the physical bus.  You can stop seeing the message by blacklisting the i2c-piix4 module.  I included the steps for RedHat and CentOS below, but you can do something similar with any other flavor of Linux.

(From RedHat Docs:)

  1. Blacklist the i2c-piix4 kernel module as follows:

Raw

# echo 'blacklist i2c-piix4' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf # tail -n 1 /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf blacklist i2c-piix4 
  1. Rebuild the initramfs/initrd as follows:
    1. Make a backup (in case the new initramfs/initrd the new version has an unexpected problem):

Raw

# cp /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img.bak 
  1. Rebuild the initramfs/initrd:

Raw

# dracut -f /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`