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toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ubuntu 22.04 freezes randomly on VMWare Professional 17

Update 2023/03/20

The latest  revision of VMWare has not solve the issue: 17.0.1 build-21139696

Environment:

OS: Windows 11 with Virtual Machine Platform installed. All patches installed.

Software: VMWare Professional 17

VM: Ubuntu 22.04 with all patches.

Windows Host Power savings config: Never put computer to sleep.

Symptoms:

No TTY response. No response to CTRL-ALT-DELETE

Have to hard reboot the VM to get things working again.

Window does not resize and no interaction keyboard or otherwise works.

I have to hard boot the VM to restore functionality.

Frequency of problem:

When I have logged out for a long period of time, when I return to the VM again it is dead.

Hardware:

Intel i9 10900K

Graphics: Nvidia 3060

64 Gig of RAM

 

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66 Replies
DodgeDeBoulet
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Dupe

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DodgeDeBoulet
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You're not alone with this issue. There's another thread on this forum with users (myself included) experiencing this problem.

I created a support incident with VMWare a week ago. They got back to me with a list of things already tried by users in the other thread, so I asked them to please contact VMWare Engineering for details on their awareness of the issue and timeframe for a fix.

I sent them a reminder earlier today. This is the response:


Sorry for the late response.  I have checked provided link. This is a known issue with different CPU cores after some of Windows updates in VMware workstation, we hope it will be resolve in next update.

Who knows when the next update will be ...

toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the reply. I hope they fix this soon as well.

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toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Perhaps, but this problem did not yield satisfactory google searches for me.

Your dupe comment does not link to an appropriate issue thread.

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DodgeDeBoulet
Enthusiast
Enthusiast


@toukay wrote:

Perhaps, but this problem did not yield satisfactory google searches for me.

Your dupe comment does not link to an appropriate issue thread.


Which is why it was edited, since posts apparently can't be deleted.

DodgeDeBoulet
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Looping back on this issue.

VMWare's tech support partner requested that I reproduce the issue and upload a support log bundle. Interestingly, the installation process (which I had to suspend/resume a dozen times to get it to complete the last time I tried to install Ubuntu 22.04) went completely without incident. I've since applied guest updates and restarted the VM a couple of times to activate them and have not experienced the issue.

I've tested the VM with and without other VMs running, after a fresh reboot, and also after the host has been running for days. I'm unable to reproduce the issue, and I'm not sure what has changed. No updates to Workstation Pro 17 have been released; there have been two Microsoft Windows updates applied, though: KB5021088 and KB5019959.

Is anyone else still experiencing the problem?

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MagicDragon
Contributor
Contributor

Hi, 

All was fine when I was running Ubuntu 20.04.
When I upgraded to 22.04 the freezing issue began.

I've gone to other posts and tried their solutions but to no avail.

I'm wondering if I add ubuntu 22.10 to VMware that may eliminate this issue.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu 22.10 has only a 6-month support plan.

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KudoiKami
Contributor
Contributor

We have just experienced the same issue with Ubuntu 22.04 on VMWare Workstation Pro 17.

The answer is to switch from Legacy BIOS to UEFI as we found.

Xavier088
Contributor
Contributor

I have same problems. I found a workaround, at least for my system (Windows 11 as host, Ubuntu 22.4 LTS as guest)

When Ubuntu is froozen please press Alt + Tab to switch between the open windows. If you do this to all open windows it defrozes Ubuntu and you can work with it as long as no screen saver starts again.

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ziolko
Contributor
Contributor

This fixed my problem. Thank you KudoiKami.

 

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frankandersendk
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you! 😊

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radamstw
Contributor
Contributor

Tried changing to UEFI Bios and it would not boot.

ghostscorpion
Contributor
Contributor

Disabling power throttling could help resolve the problem. You can disable power throttling for VMware Workstation by running a PowerShell command.

 

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware.exe"

 

Here's what each part of the command does:

  • powercfg: This is the command-line tool that manages power settings in Windows.
  • /powerthrottling: This option allows you to enable or disable power throttling, which is a feature in Windows 10 that reduces the CPU usage of inactive or background processes to save energy.
  • disable: This parameter disables power throttling.
  • /path: This option specifies the path to the executable file for which power throttling should be disabled.
  • "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware.exe": This is the path to the VMware Workstation executable file.

 

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Sheepybloke
Contributor
Contributor

Still having this issue on a new imaged i5-1235u laptop. I've tried disabling the power saving via powershell, pinning the VM to performance cores, and turning suspend off in the VM, but nothing seems to be fixing this issue. I really hope VMWare fixes this issue soon, because right now, I can't do any work with their product. For me, everything starts fine, but then I click away to read something in my Windows 10 OS and after about 10-15 min, the VM freezes. I can pause and restart the VM and everything is OK, but sometimes it just hard crashes and I have to do a full restart. I heard that there weren't any issues with Virtualbox, so I'm going to switch over to using that until they fix the issues. Hopefully they have eyes on this and will fix it soon.

toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ubuntu eventually seemed to be able to run alright with the latest patches to vmare 17.

However, Debian is still not working and freezes much more aggressively than Ubuntu did. Here's what I've done as a stop-gap on Windows 11.

I have had excellent success with Microsoft's WSL2 platform however which comes with built-in support for the major distributions:

The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed. I was happy to see that VMWare could finally play nicely with the Microsoft Virtual Machine Platform. This may not get you all the way to what you need, but is free with Windows and it works. If you need the GUI, you could install an XWindows desktop option and use VcXsrv to accomplish that.  At least until VMWare finally gets its act together with respect to Linux distributions.


Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'.

NAME FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu Ubuntu
Debian Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
OracleLinux_8_5 Oracle Linux 8.5
OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
openSUSE-Leap-15.4 openSUSE Leap 15.4
openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed

 

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toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Scratch that comment about Ubuntu behaving better. The Ubuntu VM now freezes all the time again.

It's really an awful problem

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toukay
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The syslogs I see on reboot are full of the "processor stuck" messages. See attached PNG.

 

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joshmcorreia
Contributor
Contributor

I'm having the same problem with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04. The VM starts off super quick then gets slower and slower until it completely freezes.

The only way I've found to bring it back to life is to suspend it and then un-suspend it... But I have to do that every 10 minutes or so which is a nightmare. If it sits there long enough without me suspending it then it will pop up the message "Failed to suspend virtual machine".

I tried setting the VM's BIOS to UEFI but it fails to boot so that isn't a working solution either 😞

pallenrupp
Contributor
Contributor

folks, 

I experienced the same thing, starting around late march 2023. 

Resolved by completely removing Windows WSL (Windows Services for Linux), then rebooting.

The whole issue began when our company pushed out a new WSL (Windows Services for Linux) update.  Apparently WSL and VMware Workstation don't play well together.    I hope this helps somebody 🙂  

Peter