banackm Tracker

Re: VMWare 17.5.0 update causes workstation keyboard and mouse disfunction after a period of time

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 22:33:57 GMT

So that sounds more like a Host OS interaction than the Guest-side Linux keyboard hang issue by itself...

You might want to try some of my general suggestions on this thread:

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Ubuntu-22-04-freezes-randomly-on-VMWare-Professional-17/m-p/2995976/highlight/true#M183810

It would also be helpful if you can post a vmware.log file where hits happens, to see if we can find anything odd about the VM state or your host configuration.

There appears to be another issue affecting specifically Win 11 hosts and Linux VMs that we haven't been able to pin down, where it looks like the 3D stack is implicated and the guest display might not be updating properly? You have some similarities to that issue but not the full profile.

So I would specifically try toggling 3D on/off on your VM (in addition to the general things above), or else some users have reported that running a continuously drawing application in the Guest (like glxgears) would help.

Re: VMWare 17.5.0 update causes workstation keyboard and mouse disfunction after a period of time

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 22:11:19 GMT

If the VM is powered off, you can normally downgrade the hardware version just by changing the virtualHW.version config in the vmx file. to a lower number and it will work fine.

Occasionally the hardware version upgrade changed the attached devices, and then you might be missing something after you downgrade, so back up the vmx file and/or the full VM if it's critical. But we don't generally plug/unplug virtual devices on upgrades, so you should be able to get Workstation 16 running the VM again if that's what you want.

As for why Workstation 16 doesn't have the key-repeat issues for you I couldn't say without knowing what it was... By "host" I don't necessarily mean your Host OS, it could be a Workstation product issue causing the stall, it's just outside the Guest itself, and outside the console keyboard handling.

Possibly Workstation 16 is more performant for your particular configuration/workload, or we might be tweaking something on your Host OS differently.

The reason they hit is usually that guest time stalls for a second, and when we try to catch it up the guest mistakenly thinks the key is held down longer than it should be (due to the time warp). We used to have more control over this, but most modern Linux distros switched to running the key-repeat themselves in software rather than allowing the virtual device to control it.

Re: VMWare 17.5.0 update causes workstation keyboard and mouse disfunction after a period of time

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 20:46:32 GMT

Like it's hitting key repeat briefly when you don't want it to? Or like the key is still getting stuck down and you can't release it?

I suspect that there's some underlying stall on your host that's triggering this, and probably the places you're now seeing the key repeat used to hang the keyboard entirely.

You can turn down the key repeat delay in the Linux guest is probably the best work-around I can give you short of solving the underlying host stall.

Re: Linux Guest VMs ignoring input (Windows 11 Host)

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 20:01:01 GMT

If keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE works, that's a much better tested path than the virtual USB keyboard.

Re: Linux Guest VMs ignoring input (Windows 11 Host)

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 18:03:15 GMT

Two things people can try:

(1) Power off the VM, and add the config option:

keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE

This might cause your Linux VM's input to hang if the Guest tries to Sleep/Hibernate, but it may work-around the problem.

(2) Power off the VM and make sure the VM has a USB controller, and add this config option to switch to the virtual USB keyboard:

keyboard.vusb.enable = TRUE

That will switch from using the PS/2 keyboard to the USB keyboard, but may make your key-repeat get stuck more often.

I think (1) should be sufficient to fix this, but if not try (2) as well.

Re: VMWare 17.5.0 update causes workstation keyboard and mouse disfunction after a period of time

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:59:15 GMT

Two things people can try:

(1) Power off the VM, and add the config option:

keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE

This might cause your Linux VM's input to hang if the Guest tries to Sleep/Hibernate, but it may work-around the problem.

(2) Power off the VM and make sure the VM has a USB controller, and add this config option to switch to the virtual USB keyboard:

keyboard.vusb.enable = TRUE

That will switch from using the PS/2 keyboard to the USB keyboard, but may make your key-repeat get stuck more often.

I think (1) should be sufficient to fix this, but if not try (2) as well.

Re: Ubuntu 22.04 freezes randomly on VMWare Professional 17

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:57:17 GMT

Ah sorry, or also:

(7) Toggle 3D graphics in the VM.

That changes portions of our console path, and might make this better/worse depending on the system and graphics card.

Re: Ubuntu 22.04 freezes randomly on VMWare Professional 17

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:50:02 GMT

There are unfortunately a number of separate issues being reported here I think.

Some of these things have already been noted here, but he's my recommendations for things people should try:

(1) Disable Hyper-V on the Host
(2) Disable the E cores on your system

I'm not an expert on the CPU side of this, but my understanding is that both of those things will put you on some different code paths that are triggering performance issues or intermittent stalls for some users.

(3) Disable Guest Sleep/Hibernate/PowerSave

Recent versions of Ubuntu are being more aggressive at putting the Guest into Power Save modes and engage Sleep or Hibernate when the screensaver engages. This is sometimes provoking keyboard hangs that then don't restore when the Guest wakes up again, or fails to trigger a wake-up via the keyboard.

(4) Power off the VM, and add the config option: keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE

This might make the Sleep/Hibernate hangs worse, but seems to avoid a different keyboard hang that people are hitting during normal keyboard usage.

(5) Make sure the VM has a USB controller.

This gives us an alternate mouse path which is generally better behaved, and helps reduce the traffic on the PS/2 port decreasing the chances of hitting keyboard hangs there.

(6) As a last resort, you can try switching to the virtual USB keyboard for the VM.

After making sure the VM has a USB controller, power off the VM and add this config option: keyboard.vusb.enable = TRUE

That will switch us from sending keyboard events using the PS/2 keyboard to the USB keyboard. On some Linux distros this may make your key-repeat get stuck more often, but again avoids any PS/2 keyboard hangs you might be hitting. This is however unlikely to fix any general host performance issues (if the host is stalling or generally slow on it's own), and is a less common configuration.

Re: I found a bug for the VMware® Workstation 17 Pro 17.5.0 build-22583795 with enhanced keyboard

banackm — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:32:02 GMT

Two things you can try:

(1) Power off the VM, and add the config option:

keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE

This might cause your Linux VM's input to hang if the Guest tries to Sleep/Hibernate, but it may work-around the problem.

(2) Power off the VM and make sure the VM has a USB controller, and add this config option to switch to the virtual USB keyboard:

keyboard.vusb.enable = TRUE

That will switch from using the PS/2 keyboard to the USB keyboard, but may make your key-repeat get stuck more often.

I think that (1) is sufficient to solve your problem, but if not (2) might also work-around the problem.

Re: Workstation 17.5.0: (enhanced?) keyboard driver problem

banackm — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 22:13:56 GMT

Two things people can try:

(1) Power off the VM, and add the config option:

keyboard.allowBothIRQs = FALSE

This might cause your Linux VM's input to hang if the Guest tries to Sleep/Hibernate, but it may work-around the problem.

(2) Power off the VM and make sure the VM has a USB controller, and add this config option to switch to the virtual USB keyboard:

keyboard.vusb.enable = TRUE

That will switch from using the PS/2 keyboard to the USB keyboard, but may make your key-repeat get stuck more often.

We think there's more than one problem going on here, so if people can confirm if setting either (or both) of those options fixes it that would be helpful.

Specifically, we'd love to know your Host OS, Guest OS, whether 3D is On/Off in your VM, and whether the Guest/Host are using Wayland.

Re: Grab keyboard on wayland/gnome3

banackm — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 16:24:50 GMT

The actual VM console window isn't rendered by the UI process on Linux, no.

Can you post the vmware.log and mksSandbox.log from your setup?

Re: Grab keyboard on wayland/gnome3

banackm — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:56:41 GMT

The vmplayer binary just runs the UI, not the console.

Try adding exceptions for the vmware-vmx and mksSandbox binaries instead?

Re: When trying to use 3D acceleration in VMWare Workstation Player 17, a mksSandbox crash error occ

banackm — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:45:31 GMT

@NaiPopi Can you post your mksSandbox.log too?

Re: Mouse hits "edge" when trying to play games

banackm — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:43:36 GMT

Does your VM have a USB controller attached?

I would expect that with a USB controller attached, we'll attach our virtual USB mouse, which gives us more options for sending Guest mouse events. That plus the "Gaming Mouse" setting of "Always" in the UI (or mks.gamingMouse.policy = "gaming" ) should do the same thing as turning off vmmouse.

Re: I can't start any virtual machine after updating to 17.5.0

banackm — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 15:43:58 GMT

>2023-10-20T21:30:25.569Z Wa(03) mks mksSandboxLog: PANIC: XINFO: IO fatal error.

That suggests that we lost our connection to your X11 server after our graphics stack initially connected to it successfully.

Can you post the corresponding mksSandbox.log from that crash?

You might be able to turn off 3D graphics on the VM as a work-around.

Re: vmware SVGA memory size (>8GB) and General Performance Improvement Question (host mem bandwid

banackm — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 22:17:59 GMT

5 * 2560 * 1440 = 18432000 pixels, so at 4-bytes a pixel, that's only ~70MB ? So we shouldn't have a problem just fitting the screens in.

When you say you see issues, what kinds of problems are you seeing specifically?

But no, our virtual graphics device doesn't support more than 8GB of graphics memory at a time. The Guest and Host have some ability to swap things in and out of the GPU, so with multiple applications it should be more of a soft limit than a hard limit.

As far as how much does memory bandwidth help, it's very workload dependent, so it's hard to say generally.

Re: EDITED! Workaround for Ubuntu 22.10 displaying blank screen after applying latest updates

banackm — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 03:07:13 GMT

If you could point us at the Ubuntu bug report, or else forward this information to them, we can see what we can do to help.

One of our Linux engineers looked into this and this was their analysis:

Ubuntu kernel maintainers backported the following change:

5e0137612430 ("video/aperture: Disable and unregister sysfb devices via aperture helpers")

It's change 89314ff239e1933357419fa91b20190150f114a8 in their kinetic kernel.

This change was part of a much larger series that was making sure that fb devices were properly releasing the pci resources which is necessary for proper drivers to load. Because the backport misses all those other changes it breaks PCI resource release for efifb and prevents specific drivers (e.g. vmwgfx) from being loaded. It doesn't affect many other arm64 systems because most arm64 system don't have dedicated PCI gpu's, like vmwgfx is, which is presumably why they've missed it.This change either needs to be reverted in the Ubuntu kernel or the Ubuntu maintainers need to backport all the other changes that were part of the fb/pci resource handling rework.

Re: VMware workstation 17 player no 3D support from host

banackm — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 20:54:27 GMT

Sam2555,

The logs show that your host doesn't have enough memory to start up our 3D graphics stack.

How much memory does your host have, and how big are all of the VMs you're trying to run at once?

You can try to set the following config option to reduce our 3d memory usage, but the performance/stability might suffer:

mks.sandbox.dataChannelSizeMB = 1024

Re: video Ram stuck at 4MB, what now?

banackm — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 20:10:48 GMT

Are you running on the latest HWversion? See if you can upgrade the VM by going:

VM -> Manage -> Change Hardware Compatibility...

And then select the latest hardware version.

I'm wondering because if you're seeing 128MB, that suggests you might actually be running with our older virtual hardware that doesn't support D3D11 yet, which that game lists as a minimum requirement. Newer hardware versions would normally lower that to 4MB (as far as Windows reports the dedicated memory), and then allow you to set the overall graphics memory larger than 2GB. Both the higher graphics API support and the higher graphics memory would probably help the game.

If that's still not working for you after the upgrade, if you can post a vmware.log from your attempt to run the game that would help us see your system configuration as well.

But I'll see if our development team can take a look.

Re: video Ram stuck at 4MB, what now?

banackm — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 19:37:31 GMT

If you can post the specific applications you were running, and what the error/crash was, we'd love to investigate them.