Adding to the Workstation/Player 16 woes, including a failure of Wayland support, a failure to compile, a failure to start, and a failure to launch any guest, we now can add a failure of memory management.
Specifically, on a Ubuntu 22.04 host, a Windows 10 guest freezes when, e.g., a database application (e.g., Microsoft Access .accdb) is opened or video is attempted to run in a browser (specifically, Firefox). This behavior also will occur without either of the foregoiing, but with as few as seven tabs open in Firefox with static content.
Running # top on the host reveals that the process kcompactd is pinning one CPU core at 100% while the process vmware-vmx is running at 280%-290%.
This is notwithstanding various configuration changes recommended in sundry posts across the Internet to address transparent hugepages, memory compaction, video demands, and guest behavior, including:
- Disablilng transparent hugepages and defragging thereof for the host via kernel command line (transparent_hugepage=never), and startup script (echo never | tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled; echo never | tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag; echo 0 | tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag).
- Disabling compaction proactiveness for the host in /etc/sysctl.conf (vm.compaction_proactiveness=0) and for the guest in its VMX file (vm.compaction_proactiveness=0).
- Disabling HDD write caching in the guest's Virtual Machine Settings.
- Launching vmplayer having set vblank_mode=0
- Changing the Windows 10 guest's power options to prevent powering off its HDD.
Again, notwithstanding all of the foregoing, which took a half day to implement, a Windows 10 guest nevertheless continues to freeze under trivial memory demands.
Windows 10 guests running in VirtualBox are reported not to exhibit this behavior. I currently am evaluating this and a similar guest running in KVM myself.
Windows 10 guests running in Player 15 did not exhibit this behavior, nor any of the above-mentioned other failures.
Clearly, the VMware devs have their work cut out for them to fix this flaw.
Pending a bug fix, any suggestions of further configuration to eliminate this issue would be especially well received.
