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rileyb76
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Monitor layout not functioning correctly after RHEL kernel update on Guest

Guys,

My setup is Win7 64bit host with a  2.6.32-642.el6.x86_64 (RHEL 64bit 6.8) VM running on Workstation 11.1.2.

FYI We have multiple users with the same issue.

I am not sure if its the latest RHEL kernel update or bad timing, but it seems like this started after we updated the kernel last week.

The issue is when we click on the Monitor Layout button in Workstation, we cannot span across 2 monitors anymore.

When we do click the monitor layout button and select "Layout 2", the mouse pointer seems to think its further right than it really is. 

vmware.png

Every mouse action is further right than where the mouse really is.  The desktop does not extend to monitor 2 either.

When we switch back to Layout 1, it goes back to normal.

Is this video driver related?

We tried uninstall/install VMWare Tools as well as uninstalling/reinstalling Workstation but got the same behavior.

Thanks for any input.

3 Replies
darkcube
Contributor
Contributor

I'm also having a similar issue.  I was running CentOS 6.7 on a Windows 8.1 host with no issue and then did a yum update today which upgraded me to CentOS 6.8.

Afterwards VMWare Unity mode stopped working.  I thought it might just be that the VMWare tools needed to be reinstalled so I reinstalled the latest from "View -> Reinstall VMWare Tools..." but there was no change.  I also tried upgrading my VMWare Workstation from 11.1.3 to 11.1.4 and installing the VMWare tools from the new version, again with no change.

So with Unity mode not working I tried switching to just using full screen mode, and then I realized that full screen on multiple monitors wouldn't work either.  The VM will go fullscreen, but attempting to change the monitor layout to include other monitors shows the error "The virtual machine could not be changed to the selected monitor layout.  If you just added a monitor to the host computer, you must power off and power on the virtual machine to use that monitor."

So basically right now I'm stuck with a VM that won't do Unity and won't span across multiple monitors.

Thanks!

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darkcube
Contributor
Contributor

Update,

Looks like the root cause is CentOS / RHEL updating the XOrg version from 1.15 to 1.17 in the 6.8 release.  I was able to get Unity / full screen spanning working by enabling GPU accelerration, which I believe requires Xorg 1.17 to work correctly which is why I had it disabled previously as it had no effect.

Now the only problem I'm seeing is that the mouse cursor seems to have some lag in updating to the correct icon or something which is making resizing windows very difficult.  It shows the resizing icon when hovering near the edges at times when the cursor isn't actually close enough to resize the window, which causes the window to instead drag or be clicked off of unintentionally quite often.

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darkcube
Contributor
Contributor

Some more information: I'm seeing the exact same problem as rileyb76‌ where the cursor isn't where VMWare thinks it is if I try to use full screen mode with hardware acceleration enabled.  If it's disable I don't see the issue but I can't span across multiple monitors or use Unity mode.

Also with hardware acceleration enabled I'm seeing some really trippy redrawing of my IntelliJ window when I drag it around.

So in summary it seems like RHEL/CentOS 6.8 w/ XOrg 1.17 has some pretty big bugs around hardware acceleration w/ VMWare Tools at the moment.

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