Ubuntu 22.04 freezes randomly on VMWare Professional 17

[toukay]

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

[rakotomandimby]

(for Linux hosts) mkubecek's last patch has brought a tenattive of solution: https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules/commit/2c6d66f3f1947384038b765c897b102ecdb18298

I just booted on it and I am waiting for the actual results.

[rakotomandimby]

@banackm, please point the dev team to this commit:

Mainline commit 0fcb70851fbf ("Makefile.extrawarn: turn on
missing-prototypes globally") in 6.8-rc1 enables -Wmissing-prototypes
globally, revealing a lot of unclean code and also some actual problems.
This is also the case in vmmon and vmnet modules.

Most of them are addressed by making functions used only within one file
static. The missing prototype of random_get_entropy_fallback() is handled
by including <linux/timex.h> rather than <asm/timex.h>.

Finally, there are four functions in vmnet module which are actually used
in multiple files but instead of proper declarations, their prototype is
duplicated in vmnet-only/driver.c, risking that the two copies won't match
(which actually happened in one case). The cleanest solution would be
creating separate header files for them (bridge.h, netif.h, userif.h and
vnetUserListener.h) and including them in the respective source file and
driver.c. As the developers already handle similar cases by simply putting
the declarations into vnetInt.h, let us do the same to keep things simple.

[oliver1008]

Disable the Hyper-V solved the problem for me. The Hyper-V seem like not compatible with vmware as mentioned in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/application-management/virtualization-... Run the following command in powershell to disable the Hyper-V

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor

[wdliii]

So, I've tried everything suggested here so far and NOTHING work permanently. This just happens when unexpected things happen like an unexpected shutdown.  Now however I've confirmed that doing a repair on the VMWare Workstation 17 Pro  software fixes this. It does seem to only impact Linux or derivatives.  I am running Win10 Enterprise as host.

[heypaisan]

I am also experiencing random freezing. I am running Ubuntu 22.04.3 (guest) on Windows 10 Pro (host) using VMWare Workstation Pro 15.5.7. Yes, it's an older version but it worked very well up until recently. I am starting to believe this freezing has something to do with the Linux kernel. There are lots of syslog messages referring to soft lockups (e.g. CPU stuck). My system will lock up over night so it's pretty easily reproducible. This is very frustrating.

Any updates on this??

[madmonk77]

I had a call with VMWare support team and they told me:

1- add this line to my .vmx file:

cpuid.1.ecx="----:---0:----:----:----:----:----:----"

They said this was tied to the processor I have on my laptop: intel i7 9750H

2- Disable 3D accelerated graphics.

3- Apply the keyboard changes suggested by the community here.

4- remove windows HiperV feature

After these changes they asked me to:

1. reduce the number of CPU and CPU cores to 1/2 (1 cpu/2 cores),
2. start the VM,
3. use it a bit,
4. since it didn't crashed they told me to use it and see if it behaved normally.

I have since bumped up the CPU and Cores back to 2/4 and the machine does not freeze like it used to.

I really hope this helps any one out there.

Happy VMing

[DhairyaT]

@toukay Please upgrade to the latest Workstation version 17.5.1 as this issue has been fixed in this release.

[PeterEbel63]

Didn't help in my case (Windows 10, Xubuntu 22.04, VMWare 17.5.1)

[PeterEbel63]

Unfortunately not in my case. (Windows 10, Xubuntu 22.04, VMWare 17.5.1)

[OmiTheAussie]

I have a Windows 11 (10.0.22621 Build 22621) laptop with i7-10850H CPU with 32 GB RAM and Nvidia RTX 3000 Graphics. I am running VMWare 17.5.1 build 23298084. When I run a VM with Ubuntu 20.04 with 1 processor (3 cores) and 16GB RAM, I get random freezing of the host machine. I have tried all options in this thread but doesnt work.