VMware Pro 8.5.3 crashes 3D Applications, doesn't support AMD GPUs for Accelerating 3D Graphics

[eric2013264]

Problem/Error Message

I recently tried to run 3D software for robotics simulations and it crashed giving me the error message: "VMware: vmw_ioctl_command error Invalid argument."

Turning off 3D graphics acceleration stopped the software from crashing but without it, the graphics performance is poor the point of being un-usable.

Any input is appreciated!

Environment

• Retina MacBook Pro 15" Mid 2016 (GPUs: Intel Iris Pro + AMD R9 M370X)
• Linux Ubuntu 14.04 via VMware Pro 8.5.3
• 3D intensive software I'm attempting to run is ROS's Gazebo environment

Attempts

So far I've tried looking into installing a driver for the AMD R9 M370X discrete card I have in my MacBook Pro. But AMD doesn't have a driver for the M370X for Linux.

So are there any fixes to this? Will this be updated in a future release?

Thanks in advance! :smileygrin:

[RickShu · Accepted solution]

Hi eric2013264,

Welcome to Fusion Community.

I've just tried to run GazeboSim 7 in Ubuntu 16.04 guest running in Fusion 8.5.3 and I was able to launch the application without problem. (See my screenshot)

I tried with Nvidia GPU (GT 650M) and AMD GPU (FirePro D700) and both of them worked good. So just want to confirm with you, have you updated the latest Mesa 3D driver in your Ubuntu guest? To enable OpenGL 3.3 support the Mesa3D driver is required. You can find the related information about Mesa3D from: The Mesa 3D Graphics Library

Hopefully it helps.

Regards,

-Rick

[Mikero]

Hi there,

It's possible your application is making GPU calls that we do not currently support in our 3D driver + virtual hardware.

You can NOT use a "physical" (AMD/ATI, Nvidia) driver in a VM. The VM does not see 'real' hardware, only what we present to it which is why it requires our drivers (via VMware Tools).

I'll take some time to test the software today to see if I can reproduce the issue.

Is there a set of steps that we can do to recreate the crash reliably?

[eric2013264]

Hi eric2013264,

Welcome to Fusion Community.

I've just tried to run GazeboSim 7 in Ubuntu 16.04 guest running in Fusion 8.5.3 and I was able to launch the application without problem. (See my screenshot)

I tried with Nvidia GPU (GT 650M) and AMD GPU (FirePro D700) and both of them worked good. So just want to confirm with you, have you updated the latest Mesa 3D driver in your Ubuntu guest? To enable OpenGL 3.3 support the Mesa3D driver is required. You can find the related information about Mesa3D from: The Mesa 3D Graphics Library

Hopefully it helps.

Regards,

-Rick

Wow I'm blown away at the quality of the replies from this forum. Thank you so much for taking time to test this scenario.

I ran glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version and my Mesa3D shows up as 11.2.0. Is this what it should be? If not, how would I go about updating Mesa? Although my friend who has the exact same laptop was able to run it with an older version of VMware that supporter OpenGL 2.2. Seeing this, I  found a workaround that set the version of OpenGL used to 2.2 instead of 3 and that allowed me to continue running my program (I realize the initial question posed remains unsolved).

I'll keep looking into why this is happening for me since it apparently shouldn't. Just letting you know I was able to find a work around and thank you again for taking time for writing such a great reply.

[eric2013264]

Hi there,

It's possible your application is making GPU calls that we do not currently support in our 3D driver + virtual hardware.

You can NOT use a "physical" (AMD/ATI, Nvidia) driver in a VM. The VM does not see 'real' hardware, only what we present to it which is why it requires our drivers (via VMware Tools).

I'll take some time to test the software today to see if I can reproduce the issue.

Is there a set of steps that we can do to recreate the crash reliably?

Hmmm I see. Thank you for clearing up how drivers work with VMware, I'll keep that in mind!

The issue I was having was running with launching (ROS) Gazebo using the command: roslaunch turtlebot_hazebo turtlebot_world.launch

Error message: VMware: vmw_ioctl_command error Invalid argument.

But as soon as I tell it to use OpenGL 2.1 it runs perfectly!

Thank you for your reply and looking into this!