VMware Workstation Unity Bug???

[brun0s]

Hi guys,

I don't know if any of you have experienced this already, but I think we have a bug in VMware Workstation 6.5 when running Windows applications in Unity mode.

I've been running VMware Workstation 6.5 for quite a while now, always uing Windows applications in Unity mode. The applications I use the most are Office 2003 (I have Outlook running 24x7) and MSN Messenger. I've been noticing lately whenever I have too many (more than 5) Windows applications running in Unity mode on my Linux desktop, sometimes my computer simply freezes with CPU utilization jumping up to 100%. The only way to get around, when this happens is by pressing ALTF1 to exit X and get a prompt, from there I can run top and see Xorg and vmware-vmx on top of the list each taking about 50% of my CPU, the only solution at this stage was to kill the virtual machine and get back to X using ALTF7, then restart the virtual machine.

Since this problem was driving me crazy, I decided to change my inittab to boot in user leve 3 instead of 5, once the machine boots I can login and start the graphical interface by running startx.The difference now is that if I get the freeze again, then returning to the prompt using ALT+F1 would give me some indication of what was going on, and indeed I was able to see the problem is really with VMware, here's what I have on my .xsession-errors whenever the computer freezes:

Window manager warning: last_user_time (185927915) is greater than comparison timestamp (185921262). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccura

te timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a00003 (Windows XP) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 185927915. Working around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a5731e (Microsoft ) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 185936086. Working around...

Window manager warning: last_user_time (185977669) is greater than comparison timestamp (185968862). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccura

te timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a00003 (Windows XP) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 185977528. Working around...

And the list goes on and on...when you switch using ALT+F1 you can actually see all these errors being printed out on the terminal on which you ran startx.

Before someone asks, the time between the host and the virtual machine it is being syncronized using vmware tools.

The vmware host is a Fedora 9 running on kernel 2.6.25.14-108, I have only one guest configured with Windows XP SP2. Also, I'm using gnome 2.22 as the window manager, I'm not sure if this is related or not but I'm quite sure I always have firefox 3.0.2 running as well.

Any ideas would be really helpful

Regards,

Bruno

[brun0s]

Hi guys,

Just an update on this issue, I have upgraded my workstation version to 6.5.1-126130.

It seems the problem got worse I can hardly use VMware in Unity mode due to the following NETACTIVE_WINDOW messages being logged on my .xsession-errors file:

Window manager warning: last_user_time (1335486) is greater than comparison timestamp (1333461). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccurate timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01236 (Inbox - Mi) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1335477. Working around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01ace (Untitled -) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1335486. Working around...

Window manager warning: last_user_time (1338091) is greater than comparison timestamp (1335502). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccurate timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01236 (Inbox - Mi) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1338091. Working around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01ace (Untitled -) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1338077. Working around...

Window manager warning: last_user_time (1340983) is greater than comparison timestamp (1338111). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccurate timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01236 (Inbox - Mi) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1340983. Working around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01ace (Untitled -) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1340974. Working around...

Window manager warning: last_user_time (1342963) is greater than comparison timestamp (1340998). This most likely represents a buggy client sending inaccurate timestamps in messages such as NETACTIVE_WINDOW. Trying to work around...

Window manager warning: 0x1a01236 (Inbox - Mi) appears to be one of the offending windows with a timestamp of 1342959. Working around...