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RogerLeigh
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

UEFI console crashes VMware Workstation 16 and Fusion 12

Created new VM with Workstation 16 using https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.2/FreeBSD-12.2-BETA3-amd64-disc1.iso.xz

VM used UEFI bios, with 2 GB RAM, 2 processor cores and a 20GB HDD.  Stock install with ZFS.

Installer booted just fine with UEFI and ran to completion.  After install, I get the following error at boot.  If I dismiss the error dialogue box too quickly, VMware Workstation freezes and requires forcibly closing.  Looks like it's triggered some UEFI console-related bug in VMware workstation itself.  I have attached the full logs for this run plus the VM configuration.

Any workarounds known for this?  I was specifically wanting to use the UEFI console support that FreeBSD 12 provides.

Thanks,

Roger

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23 Replies
hwano1010
Contributor
Contributor

@TripleEmcoder Boot delay can be set in VM Option. See this https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1004129

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dariusd
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

FINALLY got around to looking at this issue again.  The underlying problem seems to be some unsafe memory-map assumptions made by the FreeBSD EFI bootloader (FreeBSD bug 209821) that our platform unfortunately tickles, along with some physical Asus systems too.  The underlying problem has been there all along; FreeBSD bug 251866 was just a matter of a change making the problem much more severe by increasing the bootloader's memory requirement.

The fix in FreeBSD bug 209821 will hopefully correct the issue for FreeBSD 13 and newer.

For FreeBSD 12 in a VMware VM, try working around the problem by doing both of the following:

  • Ensure that your FreeBSD VM is configured with at least 384 MBytes of RAM.
  • Edit the .vmx file to add the option pciHole.dyn = "FALSE"

This will ensure that our EFI firmware does not put anything important within the lowest 256 MBytes of RAM, which should allow the FreeBSD bootloader to move its staging area without corrupting anything important, even without the fix for FreeBSD bug 209821.

Hope this helps!

TripleEmcoder
Contributor
Contributor

@dariusd still the same issue for me, is there anything else I should verify/set?

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btse
Contributor
Contributor

@dariusd Just ran into this issue. Editing the .vmx file worked for me.

Thank you

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