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Big Sur Host: Nested virtualization on Win10 Guest: BSODs with WSL, "Virtual Machine Platform" on

Could this be a bug in VMware Fusion / VMware Tools when nested virtualization is enabled?

My setup:

  • macOS BigSur Version 11.4
  • iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) 64GB memory
  • VMware Fusion Professional Version 12.1.2 (17964953)
  • Guest OS: Windows 10 Pro 21H1 freshly installed without internet access
    • 4 cores CPU, 8GB RAM
    • "Enable hypervisor applications in this virtual machine"
    • "Accelerate 3D Graphics", 8GB Shared graphics memory
    • "Use full resolution for Retina display"
    • Network adapter: Private to my Mac
    • Hard disk 60GB
    • The rest are defaults.

To recreate the problem:

  1. After Guest OS install is completed, ensure that VMware Tools 11.2.6 is installed.
  2. In Guest OS, Open "Turn Windows features on or off" and enable the following:
    1. Virtual Machine Platform
    2. Windows Subsystem for Linux
  3. Reboot
  4. Wait for a few minutes (even without logging in): BSOD "CRITICAL PROCESS DIED" and later other kinds of BSOD also.

This is a very simple test without anything special: fresh install with no additional 3rd party SW on Guest OS.

If Virtual Machine Platform is not enabled I don't see this BSOD.

Other kinds of BSOD also happen occasionally. List of BSOD stop codes observed so far with this setup:

  • CRITICAL PROCESS DIED
  • KERNEL SECURITY CHECK FAILURE

Also if WSL and Virtual Machine Platform are disabled, but Hyper-V is enabled: BSOD happens. Only when nested virtualisation is completely disabled is when I experience a stable Guest OS environment.

Anyone can recreate and confirm this? If so, could a VMware engineer look into this?

Thanks

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