Guido3 Tracker

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

Guido3 — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:08:43 GMT

I worked around my issues by reverting VM ware workstation back to 17.0.0. Since I already spent so much time trying to analyse this problem I figured I might as well add a little guide on how to roll back your version.

During my 17.5.0 installation I let it upgrade my encryption to the latest standards, so when I tried to downgrade, I had to remove the encryption first. You can do that by editing your virtual machine settings:

And then press Remove Encryption. This exampled shows a grayed out button, because this is a screenshot from a Windows machine, but it was enabled for my Fedora VM:

Then revert the VM compatibility to VM Workstation 17.x

Change it here:

And now just use the "Add and remove programs" from windows to start the VM Workstation uninstaller. After that you may want to reboot and install 17.0.0. Hopefully the VM ware team will come with a patch to fix the issues.

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

Guido3 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 13:02:41 GMT

Hi @wila ,

I'm sorry, I was not aware that the API's are separate from the 'feature install hyper-v', thank you for clarifying!

I did look it up and it says:

In(05) vmx Monitor Mode: CPL0

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

Guido3 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 12:44:42 GMT

Maybe some extra information.. my enhanced keyboard IS off.. and hyper-v is also not installed. Today it ran fine all morning.. then stopped working in the afternoon. When it freezes, num-lock is not responding anymore either. The key cursor is still blinking.

In an attempt to figure out what parameters are influencing the freezing, I will enable the enhanced keyboard in the VM, since I did install it after doing a clean VM ware workstation 7.5.0 install but left it disabeld in the VM. Just note that it was also freezing when the enhanced keyboard driver wasn't even installed with VM ware.

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

Guido3 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:01:04 GMT

I seem to have the same problem here.

My host is:
Edition Windows 10 Pro
Version 22H2
OS build 19045.3570
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19052.1000.0

VM ware:
VMware® Workstation 17 Pro
17.5.0 build-22583795

The virtual machine with open-vm-tools installed and latest updates:
Fedora release 38

I'm using it for software development and what seems to happen is that everything appears to stop responding, but what really happens is that the virtual machine is still running, but it just won't respond to input anymore. I can still SSH into the machine, it just won't register mouse clicks or keyboard actions anymore. I found no workaround for this other than letting VM workstation shutdown the machine and reboot and in the process lose unsaved work! The frequency of this happening is also not predictable. It may happen after working 5 hours without any issues, but it can also happen much faster, like within one hour.

As you can imagine, losing unsaved files and having to reboot is rather inconvenient. I hope that this is fixed soon. I am considering downgrading to VMware workstation 7.0.0, but I doubt that I can downgrade at this point, since I ran the encrypted disk updater. So perhaps it's time to restore an older backup along with VMware 7.0.0, but then that will make me hesitant to ever up again!