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Freeko
Contributor
Contributor

Vmware player totally freezing Ubuntu

It used to work perfectly well but at some point it became almost unusable - I'm running Windows 8.1 guest on Ubuntu 14.10 host (vmplayer 7.0, attaching about screenshot).

It is i7 with 8 gigs of ram, 2x SSD (windows guest on dedicated SSD), nVidia NVS 5400M, original nvidia driver).

At some point cpu usage increases dramatically without me doing anything in guest and just stays high.

It's impossible to use host or guest (I can't even switch KDE or Windows' windows, the graphical UI just freezes).

Even if I try to SSH to the machine, it is also horribly slow (it takes an minute to login).

TOP reveals vmware-vmx and xorg cpu usage very high.

If I strace, I can see many "resource temporarily unavailable" errors, I guess that could be the reason for lockups (see attached files)

Does anyone have an idea what could be wrong? :-S

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38 Replies
ChrisGoneBad
Contributor
Contributor

I am having the exact same problem. It started with the upgrade from (K)Ubuntu 14.04 to 14.10. VMware Player 6 used to work perfectly, since the upgrade I have been experiencing high CPU usage whenever I try to switch between KDE and the virtual machine, among other things. Upgrading to VMware Player 7 did not solve the problem.

Could you make any progress on isolating the cause of the problem?

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abrama
Contributor
Contributor

Same issue here (high cpu on vmware-vmx).  It was working fine on ubuntu 14.04 host, but when I upgraded to 14.10 the high cpu issue started with vmware player.

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Freeko
Contributor
Contributor

Woo-hoo, I'm not the only one Smiley Happy

I installed (trial) workstation 11 and it's the same thing 😞

I disabled VSS in Windows guest and it isn't helping.

Anyone, any idea?

stefanbecker
Contributor
Contributor

Same problem.

For me its Suse 13.2 64 Bit on 2 machines (AMD A8 / AMD 10) using the Radeon on the CPU.

Its better without 3D in the guest.

On the same machines there are no problems with VirtualBox / same Guests (Vista - Win 8.1).

scarpam
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same issue too. I just upgraded my huge (i7 4770K, 32G RAM, 24TB disk) workstation from Ubuntu 14.04LTS to 14.10 and upgraded vmplayer running on it too. Now all my Win7 Ultimate VMs are freezing now and then and causing a UNITY freeze too. Ubuntu itself is not frozen because all the running processes stay alive and (for example) a printing job goes on even with unresponsive unity interface. Before (VMPlayer 6.0.1 on Ubuntu 14.04) everything was working without problems.

I don't know if it is a kernel issue or vmplayer issue because I didn't run vmplayer 6.0.1 on 14.10. I hope someone can help us otherwise I will be forced to switch to other virtualization platforms.

I also experienced the same behaviour with a brand new (fresh) install of Ubuntu 14.10 and VMplayer 7 on an ASUS 4th generation i3 Notebook (no matter for performance, all I need is a stable system).

Messaggio modificato da scarpam (I apologize for my english)

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Freeko
Contributor
Contributor

I upgraded from kernel 3.16.x to 3.18.x and it's the same.

Yes, as scarpam wrote, it's only the UI that freezes. I can SSH (tho it's really slow) into machine (and kill vmware-vmx).

stefanbecker
Contributor
Contributor

Great support Smiley Happy

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edwardotis
Contributor
Contributor

Similar problem here. Got so bad that I couldn't get anything done inside ubuntu.

I just updated my vmware player tools and rebooted. I had let the tools get several revisions out of date.

That appears to have fixed the freezing. Though it's only been an hour since I updated tools, so hopefully it holds up.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102252...

VMware Player 6.0.5 build-2443746

Host:

Windows 7 Pro, SP1

Guest:

$ cat /etc/lsb-release

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu

DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04

DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS"

$ uname -a

Linux myvm 3.13.0-45-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 13 19:36:28 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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viderbit
Contributor
Contributor

I can confirm the same issue on Fedora with latest updates.

In my case those hangs are caused, when I enable the guest video 3D option from the VM settings...

Basically we should wait for new DRI modules for our linux distros.

I can confirm that with Fedora 20 and the latest Intel Graphics Intaller driver, everything was ok.

Then I updated to Fedora 21 and that was the problem :smileygrin: Intel still don't have the new driver installer (that include the new corresponding DRI module), so at least for me, I am stuck with this issue.

scarpam
Contributor
Contributor

Good news from the Ubuntu point of view.

Today I upgraded from 7.0.0 to 7.1.0 and all my freezing WMs are no longer freezing even with 3D acceleration enabled on my i7 4770K.

Can someone confirm that the freeze is no longer a problem?

(I apologize for my english)

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Freeko
Contributor
Contributor

Sadly it is still not working for me (on 7.1) :-S

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stefanbecker
Contributor
Contributor

+1 (not working)

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harry4516
Contributor
Contributor

same here on OpenSuse 13.2 and WMware Workstation 11.1 (the new update from Feb 2015)

After a while KDE becomes unusable slow. Everything else works fine, just the GUI slows down dramatically.

I tried hundered of things and spent a lot of time in this issue,

tried different grafic cards, different drivers, change hard drives ...

but no luck.

VMware , please please help us !!!!!!

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stefanbecker
Contributor
Contributor

No answer in an answer.

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cvrdheeraj
Contributor
Contributor

Same issue here with VMWare Workstation 11.1 and Arch Linux with 3.18.6 kernel.

I have freezes all the time on my host when running a Windows 7 guest and the freezes range from 2 seconds to nearly 5 minutes. I can SSH into the machine and find that vmware and kwin, xorg are using up 100% cpu. This is really annoying. If Vmware doesn't fix this issue soon enough, I am switching to KVM.

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shbelay
Contributor
Contributor

I'm having the same issue. I have Windows 8.1 and running Ubuntu 14.04 on VMware Workstation 11. It will freeze my computer for up to a few minutes. Sometimes Ubuntu will completely shut off. Restarted a few times and the problem persists.

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dbasabe
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

I've found a fix for this issue. Try to execute vmware disabling the screen vertical syncronization with vblank_mode environment variable:

vblank_mode=0 vmware

Now I've got my guests accelerated again Smiley Happy

wixoff
Contributor
Contributor

Well done, dbasabe.  Your post just solved several months of aggravation for me.

Fedora 21 (now 22 beta) host, Windows 7 x64 guest, VMplayer 7.0 and 7.1, 3D acceleration enabled -- the system GUI would freeze up entirely within seconds or minutes of starting up the guest.  Mouse pointer still moved, and some host system window updates continued to happen, but all else appeared frozen in both the guest AND host.  I had to ssh in and kill vmware-vmx to get control of the system back.  Without 3D acceleration, everything worked fine.

This vblank_mode fix seems to solve it for me.  Acceleration works again.

Kudos.  What a weird regression though.

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CE12345
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I have the same problem, I suppose that it is the solution.

However, sorry for the stupid question: could you plese tell me which conf-file I have to adapt? I tried the /etc/vmware/config and then VM-Ware didn't start any more, so this was obviously the wrong one.

Thanks in advance for your anwers

Claudia

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