Fusion on Intel Mac constantly crashing

[Mojosam]

My iMac is running OS 12.6.6. It has 32GB RAM.

VMware Fusion Player is ver. 13.0.2.

The guest OS is Lubuntu 22.04.2 LTS.

LXQt is ver. 0.17.0.

The virtual machine crashes hard and often. The crash occurs doing something innocuous like pulling down a menu or trying to drag the window. The whole VM just dies. The old VM window disappears and is replaced by a new VM window that just shows a lot of text frozen in a hung state. I have to use Fusion's menu bar to send a Ctl-Alt-Del. Sometimes I have to do that twice. That will restart the VM. Then Lubuntu takes a long time to start up; presumably it is running some sort of internal check to see if it tore a lung or burst a spleen.

[Technogeezer]

Is Fusion crashing, or is the Lubuntu OS crashing?

Are the operations you describe (moving a window, choosing a menu) being performed in the VM (manipulating the menus within the VM, for example)?

Have you examined any logging provided in the VM for a clue to what is happening from its point of view?

What tools implementation are you running in the VM? Open-vm-tools or VMware Tools installed via Fusion’s menus? (You should be using former, not the latter) 

[Technogeezer]

I just installed Lubuntu 22.04.2 LTS in a VM on Fusion 13.0.2/macOS 12.6.6. My host hardware is a 2014 Mac mini with 2CPU and 8GB of memory.

I installed both open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop using apt install from the distro's repos. I did not install VMware Tools from the Fusion menu.s. Haven't seen this kind of behavior. 

[Mojosam]

Thanks for the information. You went well beyond expectation by installing it yourself!

You are correct. I should have been a bit clearer. It is Lubuntu that is crashing. I guess my bias is that it must be crashing because of some sort of incompatibility with VMware, but I don't know that for a fact.

I have open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop installed.

I don't have any experience with Linux log files. I used to know a bit about troubleshooting Unix, but those days are in the very distant past.

I looked in /var/log/kern.log. There are definitely crash traces in there. I won't reproduce the whole thing. These are the first few lines of the three traces that occurred as a result of the last crash. I can grab more if it would help. Do you see anything here that gives a hint of what is going on?

[   58.421722] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[   58.421725] refcount_t: addition on 0; use-after-free.
[   58.421756] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1358 at lib/refcount.c:25 refcount_warn_saturate+0xa3/0x150
…
[   58.421993] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[   58.421994] refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free.
[   58.422009] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1358 at lib/refcount.c:28 refcount_warn_saturate+0xfb/0x150
…
[   58.422207] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[   58.422208] refcount_t: saturated; leaking memory.
[   58.422222] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1358 at lib/refcount.c:22 refcount_warn_saturate+0x148/0x150

[Technogeezer]

I have seen those use-after-free messages, but only infrequently and at the time the VM started. Not sure if that's the cause of the problem though.

I'm not going to rule out anything VMware-related as my testing has been rudimentary at best.

How do you have your VM configured for vCPUs and memory?

 

[Mojosam]

It's set up with 2 cores and 4GB RAM.

The fact that it's on an external hard drive shouldn't matter, should it?

[Technogeezer]

---

 wrote:

It's set up with 2 cores and 4GB RAM.

The fact that it's on an external hard drive shouldn't matter, should it?

---

Running on a external disk might make it slower but I wouldn’t think it would cause that kind of issue. I’ll verify that with my test bed (I have a USB 2 hard drive that I can move my VM to).

Your vcpu and memory match mine, by the way. 

[Mojosam]

I set up a new VM. So far it's not crashing. I'm guessing that the VM got corrupted somehow. If the crash reappears, I'll post here about it. Thanks for your efforts to figure this out.

[ColoradoMarmot]

If your iMac is over 3 years old and has a spinning disk drive, check first aid in disk utility - it's possible that the drive is starting to fail and corrupted the VM.

[Mojosam]

That's a good point.

I run First Aid every couple of weeks. It keeps reporting corrupt snapshots. Those are redundant backup indexes. It doesn't report any other problems.

[ColoradoMarmot]

That shouldn't be happening.  Do you have something like https://www.volitans-software.com/apps/smart-utility/ that you can use to check the smart status?

 

I'd definitely start using something like carbon copy cloner to make regular backups of that drive (if the VM is shut down, it'll copy those too), and consider replacing the drive.

[Mojosam]

Tech Tool can read SMART status. The drive reports no problems.

I see that SMART Utility claims it can do more. I'll have to look into it.

EDIT: SMART Utility seems to be defunct. The download links don't work.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Ah, thanks.  Haven't needed it in years.

Unfortunately Disk Warrior/Drive Genius/etc don't work on APFS drives yet AFAIK, but the corrupt snapshots are still concerning.

[Technogeezer]

---

 wrote:

Ah, thanks.  Haven't needed it in years.

Unfortunately Disk Warrior/Drive Genius/etc don't work on APFS drives yet AFAIK, but the corrupt snapshots are still concerning.

---

I believe that you are correct. Certainly DW and Drive Genius don't support APFS. AFAIK no other third party disk repair utilities for APFS file systems are available other than Apple's Disk Utility/fsck_apfs. The corrupt snapshots are indeed troubling, especially if they recur after being repaired with Disk Utility. 

[Mojosam]

Disk Utility is unable to repair the snapshots. It tells me what command to run, but that appears to be the same command that it runs itself when you call it.