VMware Workstation

  • 1.  Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Jan 30, 2025 11:10 AM
    Edited by gbohn Jan 30, 2025 11:12 AM

    I created a fresh Fedora 41 Guest (on a Windows 11 23H2 host using Workstation 17.5.2), and many things seem broken.

    I had to down-level the mesa-dri-drivers package since the updated version prevented GUI things from running at all (thanks to the "techogeezer"  post on the subject or I wouldn't have known about it).

    I still can't run with 3D enabled, but worse than that the sound seems totally broken. It's extremely halting/choppy at best.

    Is this a known issue? For comparison, on the same system a RHEL 8.10 Guest seems to work with proper sound and 3D acceleration.

    I also get strange video artifacts sometimes in the guest, but I wasn't sure if that was related to the down-level mesa-dri-drivers or not.

    Thanks.



  • 2.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Jan 30, 2025 05:33 PM
    Edited by gbohn Jan 30, 2025 05:37 PM

    I made some progress for the moment at least on the audio issue.

    Performing

           sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio

           sudo dnf swap wireplumber pipewire-media-session

    has had the effect of fixing the sound at the moment.

    I'm only guessing this uses an older package to do the sound.

    In the meantime I discovered so many bad things about trying to run a Fedora 41 guest under Windows. Including

        *) With the Host hypervisor running full-screen, trying to switch in and out of the Guest often results

            in my mouse flickering in the Host VMWare workstation bar at the top, and frequently results

           in my mouse on the host getting stuck in the upper left corner of the Host screen when switching away for no obvious reason.

       *) If I leave the Fedora Guest running and go to another Guest or the host for a while, switching back to

           the Fedora 41 Guest shows an all black screen I can't seem to clear up.

    Sigh... In contrast, RHEL 8.10 as a guest seems to work fairly well on the same system.

      




  • 3.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jan 31, 2025 07:07 AM

    Hi gbohn,

    The fix for the Mesa issue should be in Mesa 24.3.4, but unless you can afford to build that yourself, you will need to wait for Fedora to upgrade its Mesa package.

    Re Fedora getting a black screen after a while, one possible cause could be the screen saver -> screen blanker kicking in, while the VM has lost kbd/mouse focus. It may take returning focus, e.g. by a mouse click over the VM desktop, *and* pressing something on the kbd, repeatedly if needed, for the desktop to wake up. If that does not help, try ssh-ing into the VM and observing the VM state from the terminal -- excessive CPU loads (top), critical events in the kernel log (sudo dmesg), the state of the shell (journalctl -b, then search for gnome messages).

    Regards,

    Martin




  • 4.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Jan 31, 2025 10:22 AM
    Edited by gbohn Jan 31, 2025 11:26 AM

    Hi;

    Thanks.

    1) I discovered that two of the mouse related issues I am seeing seem to be related to 'grabbing' focus/mouse. I noticed that when I move my mouse to the top from within the Fedora 41 Guest running full-screen (to get the drop-down panel to lower) I see a lot of 'flickering' of the mouse pointer itself. (This isn't an issue for other Guests like RHEL 8.10).

    The mouse cursor appears and disappears rapidly.

    Then often if I hit 'minimize' I am back at my windows desktop (as expected) but the mouse pointer is stuck in the upper left corner and doesn't move at all when I move the mouse.

    Hitting 'Ctrl-Shift' gets my mouse back and working on the desktop, although sometimes it thinks I'm marking an area and dragging a selection.

    So I suspect this has something to do with automatic grabbing.

    Hitting control-shift before moving to the top Workstation panel (while in the Guest) seems to avoid the issues (no mouse pointer flickering on the top panel and no stuck Windows mouse pointer).

    2) As far as the black screen issue goes, I let the screen timeout expire and recreated the black screen issue. I am currently using KDE plasma, but I'll try again with Gnome.

    Using KDE at least, I can't seem to get things back to working by mouse clicking or entering keystrokes on the black full-screen session. black-1.jpg shows the black screen with a white area at the top where the Workstation menu had dropped down in to and then scrolled back up.

    SSHing in shows no unusual CPU usage (as reported by 'top'). dmesg doesn't seem to show anything obvious (although I'm not sure what exactly to look for). At least by the end

    [  698.808283] nvme nvme0: I/O tag 192 (20c0) QID 1 timeout, completion polled
    [  698.808299] nvme nvme0: I/O tag 195 (10c3) QID 2 timeout, completion polled
    [  698.808331] nvme nvme0: I/O tag 162 (40a2) QID 3 timeout, completion polled
    [  729.528521] nvme nvme0: I/O tag 193 (f0c1) QID 1 timeout, completion polled


    I see a few things in jornalctl, but I'm not sure if they're problematic.

    2025-01-31T14:23:53.697Z In(05) vmx MemSched: locked 1895571 target 3167801 balloon 0 0 1980435 swapped 19517 0 allocd 0 512 state 0 100
    2025-01-31T14:23:53.697Z In(05) vmx MemSched: states: 0 1801 : 1 0 : 2 0 : 3 0
    2025-01-31T14:23:53.697Z In(05) vmx MemSched: Balloon enabled 1 guestType 1 maxSize 3046824
    2025-01-31T14:23:56.028Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:23:59.374Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:23:59.566Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:23:59.772Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:23:59.938Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:24:37.970Z In(05) vmx ToolsSetDisplayTopology: Sending rpcMsg = DisplayTopology_Set 1 , 0 0 800 600
    2025-01-31T14:24:37.973Z In(05) vmx Tools_SetGuestResolution: Sending rpcMsg = Resolution_Set 2560 1440
    2025-01-31T14:24:37.982Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #0 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:24:37.985Z In(05) vmx Tools_SetGuestResolution: Sending rpcMsg = Resolution_Set 1595 923
    2025-01-31T14:24:46.241Z In(05) vmx Tools_SetGuestResolution: Sending rpcMsg = Resolution_Set 2560 1440
    2025-01-31T14:24:46.251Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:24:46.260Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #0 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:24:50.554Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #0 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:24:50.564Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #1 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:27:27.855Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #1 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:27:29.981Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:30:01.997Z In(05) mks MKS_ConsoleGrab: Requested grab into invalid window (windowId=0, numWindows=0)
    2025-01-31T14:30:12.237Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #0 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.
    2025-01-31T14:30:12.251Z In(05) mks SWBWindow: Window #1 validation failed: no valid host window or host surface.

    However, I did discover that using 'VM / Send Ctrl-Alt-Del' from the top panel to send a C-A-D to the guest does seem to bring back the display.

    Edit  : Using 'VM / Grab input' followed by keystrokes seemed to work one time to brings things back. But I can't seem to get it to work again.




  • 5.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Jan 31, 2025 04:44 PM

    > Mesa 24.3.4, 

    As luck would have it, this version was presented in updates when I checked today.

    After removing the mesa-dri-drivers versionlock I installed the update and I was able to start and log-in (with 3D disabled in the Guest VM settings). mesa-dri-drivers 24.3.4-3.fc41_x86_64.

    Hooray.

    I then tried starting with 'Enable 3D Acceleration' checked for the Guest (in a full-screen). But this seems to stall out right before the Log-in Panel would be presented. No input seemed to affect it and it appeared hung to all intents and purposes.

    See the attached image from a Windowed attempt showing where it seemed to stall out.

    I was able to ssh in at this time, so it was running after a fashion at least.

    I then discovered that by 'minimizing'/ leaving full screen mode through the Workstation panel, the screen refreshed and  now showed the log-in panel. I could then log-in apparently o.k. 

    Similarly, if I started in a window and then went to full-screen after the apparent stall, the log in panel appeared once I got to the full screen.

    After logging in, glxinfo shows

      direct rendering: Yes

    which I guess is promising.

    I'm not sure what to look for in 'journalctl -b', but these are the last lines after toggling the screen mode (so that it was presenting the log-in display).

    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: vboxclient.service - VirtualBox guest VMSVGA resize client was skipped because no trigger condition checks were met.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[2051]: Starting grub-boot-success.service - Mark boot as successful...
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: vboxclient.service - VirtualBox guest VMSVGA resize client was skipped because no trigger condition checks were met.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[2051]: Finished grub-boot-success.service - Mark boot as successful.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA gnome-shell[1375]: Registering session with GDM
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Received SIGRTMIN+21 from PID 570 (plymouthd).
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Finished plymouth-quit-wait.service - Hold until boot process finishes up.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA audit[1]: SERVICE_START pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=plymouth-quit-wait comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/system>
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Reached target multi-user.target - Multi-User System.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Reached target graphical.target - Graphical Interface.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Starting systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service - Record Runlevel Change in UTMP...
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA audit[2140]: SYSTEM_RUNLEVEL pid=2140 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='old-level=N new-level=5 comm="systemd-update-utmp" exe="/us>
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service: Deactivated successfully.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Finished systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service - Record Runlevel Change in UTMP.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: Startup finished in 2.054s (kernel) + 1.330s (initrd) + 4min 36.473s (userspace) = 4min 39.858s.
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA audit[1]: SERVICE_START pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-update-utmp-runlevel comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/syst>
    Jan 31 13:22:44 OC-FEDORA audit[1]: SERVICE_STOP pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-update-utmp-runlevel comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/syste>
    Jan 31 13:22:46 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: vboxclient.service - VirtualBox guest VMSVGA resize client was skipped because no trigger condition checks were met.
    Jan 31 13:23:18 OC-FEDORA PackageKit[1449]: daemon quit
    Jan 31 13:23:18 OC-FEDORA systemd[1]: packagekit.service: Deactivated successfully.
    Jan 31 13:23:18 OC-FEDORA audit[1]: SERVICE_STOP pid=1 uid=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295 subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=packagekit comm="systemd" exe="/usr/lib/systemd/systemd" hostna>
    lines 3060-3098/3098 (END)




  • 6.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Feb 12, 2025 05:11 PM
    Edited by gbohn Feb 12, 2025 05:12 PM

    So just an update for anyone having issues with a Fedora 41 guest and Workstation (17.5.2 under Windows 11 23H2).

    Here's what I have been able to work around. This is using KDE Plasma as the desktop in my case, but some of the issues aren't related to the specific desktop being used.

    1) Sound- I originally had unusable sound. I did the previously mentioned 'sudo dnf swap ...' to get things working.

        But I discovered I could put the packages back to the way they originally were and update the 'alsa' values for

             api.alsa.period-size   = 1024
             api.alsa.headroom      = 8192

        and it also seems to work for my setup.

    2) The mesa-dri-drivers package update to 24.3.4 fixed some issues.

    3) Currently I still sometimes have to leave full-screen and come back to 'unstick' the guest display. Such as 

         right before the log-in panel is presented on initial boot.

    4) I had an issue with the screen going black and not wanting to come back unless I sent a C-A-D to the

         guest. This was indeed 'screen lock' related for most of the cases. I set to never dim the screen and this doesn't

        seem to be an issue for that case anyway.

    5) I still see an issue where (when the guest is in full-screen), if I bring the mouse up to cause the Workstation panel

         to lower, the cursor flickers as I move it and I sometimes have my mouse stuck to the upper left of the host screen when

         I hit minimize (to get back to the Host desktop).

         I can work around this by hitting Ctl-Shift first (to release the mouse etc.). That also works to "un-peg"

         the mouse if I didn't hit it first before hitting minimize and the mouse has become has become stuck

         in the upper left corner on the Host screen.

        This seems to be an issue with the KDE Plasma desktop and not the Gnome desktop for some reason.




  • 7.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Feb 13, 2025 05:00 AM

    Hi gbhon,

    Thank you for all the feedback on Fedora 41 / WS 17.5.2 on Windows.

    Re (4), do I understand you right that once you set the screen to not dim/powersave, the issue goes away?

    Regards,

    Martin




  • 8.  RE: Fedora 41 sound (and video) problems

    Posted Feb 13, 2025 11:04 AM
    Edited by gbohn Feb 13, 2025 03:03 PM

    Yes. Sorry for being imprecise, but for this particular issue #4 the actual change I made (to work around this issue) was made in the KDE Plasma 'System Settings / Power Management' area.

    There is a section labeled "Display and Brightness". I changed the settings for  "Dim automatically" and "Turn off screen".

    I changed these to 'Never' and that seems to have improved this specific issue (although other display quirkiness remains).

    P.S.- Playing with these settings a little more seems to show that the 'Turn off screen' part was what was prompted the issue.