open-vm-toolsd SIGSEGV in Fedora 44 Guest

[gbohn]

Hi;

I recently updated a Fedora 43 Guest (running under a Windows 11 Host) to Fedora 44.

I noticed that since then I sometimes get a SIGSEGV crash from 'open-vm-toolds'. (This didn't use to happen under Fedora 43).

When this happened I was moving a scroll bar in a Chrome Browser tab up and down at the time.

I am currently running with guest 3D Acceleration disabled, KDE Plasma 6.7.4, and Workstation 25H2u1.

Is this a known issue? What won't work after this crashes?

[Technogeezer]

You might want to provide the stack trace as a file attachment (in text, please - it's very difficult to parse through screen shots). 

Have you checked the logging in the VM to see if the out-of-memory killer process in Fedora has killed vmtoolsd? Or that swap space has been exhausted due to memory over-commitment? 

Does this occur with Firefox or other browsers? 

------------------------------
Paul Rockwell (technogeezer)
vExpert 2026 (3x)
------------------------------

[gbohn]

I didn't think it was related to memory usage as it was a SIGSEGV.

In an attempt to reproduce this, I installed a brand new KDE Fedora 44 with 3D set and updated it to latest level.

I then opened Firefox (just to make sure it wasn't related to chrome). I went to a youtube page (so it would have plenty of scroll space).

I then grabbed the scroll bar and furiously yanked it up and down. This appeared to generally work (and not SIGSEGV), but I noticed two things:

A) I kept getting an icon every once in a while on the lower taskbar for a few seconds. Not sure what it was about, but I think the icon said 'vmware-exe').

and

B) my dmesg output was loaded with entries apparently related to the vmware video driver.

Things like

[  274.635652] vmwgfx 0000:00:0f.0: [drm] User surface fd 212 (handle 5266) is null.
[  274.676339] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[  274.676344] WARNING: drivers/gpu/drm/vmwgfx/vmwgfx_surface.c:958 at vmw_buffer_prime_to_surface_base+0x108/0x120 [vmwgfx], CPU#0: kwin_wayland/1640
[  274.676360] Modules linked in: overlay uinput snd_seq_dummy snd_hrtimer nf_conntrack_netbios_ns nf_conntrack_broadcast nft_fib_inet nft_fib_ipv4 nft_fib_ipv6 nft_fib nft_reject_inet nf_reject_ipv4 nf_reject_ipv6 nft_reject nft_ct nft_chain_nat nf_nat nf_conntrack nf_defrag_ipv6 nf_defrag_ipv4 nf_tables sunrpc snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event qrtr rfkill vmw_balloon vfat fat snd_ens1371 intel_rapl_msr intel_rapl_common snd_ac97_codec gameport snd_rawmidi ac97_bus snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_pcm pcspkr snd_timer vmxnet3 snd soundcore i2c_piix4 i2c_smbus joydev zram lz4hc_compress vmw_vsock_vmci_transport vsock vmw_vmci nvme nvme_core nvme_keyring nvme_auth vmwgfx ata_generic drm_ttm_helper pata_acpi ttm serio_raw fuse i2c_dev
[  274.676412] CPU: 0 UID: 1000 PID: 1640 Comm: kwin_wayland Tainted: G        W           7.2.4-200.fc44.x86_64 #1 PREEMPT(lazy) 
[  274.676416] Tainted: [W]=WARN
[  274.676417] Hardware name: VMware, Inc. VMware20,1/440BX Desktop Reference Platform, BIOS VMW201.00V.24866131.B64.2507211911 07/21/2025
[  274.676419] RIP: 0010:vmw_buffer_prime_to_surface_base+0x108/0x120 [vmwgfx]
[  274.676425] Code: 41 5f e9 fb a4 97 d3 be 03 00 00 00 89 44 24 04 e8 cd 54 f4 d2 8b 44 24 04 eb ca 89 44 24 04 e8 8e 5b 2c d3 8b 44 24 04 eb bb <0f> 0b 8b 4d 00 48 85 

I will attach the last few entries from dmesg.

Attachment(s)

Fed-44-dmesg.txt   37 KB 1 version

[richard612]

You've mentioned 3D is turned off... What else is set for display/graphics?

I ask because I've had similar issues with kde-plasma and the qty of video memory allocated by VMware WS for a given screen resolution.  These were resolved after increasing the max. resolution setting one step beyond the VMs actual resolution.  If already at 3840x2160, try specifying 2 monitors.  If "use host settings" is chosen, try 2x 3840x2160.  The relevant .vmx setting is svga.vramSize.

See if that helps...

[gbohn]

> You've mentioned 3D is turned off... What else is set for display/graphics?

To be clear, the original SIGSEGV in comment #1 was with 3D acceleration disabled. The dmesg things I mention in comment #3 were with 3D enabled though as I was trying out different things to see what happened.

The video settings were the same other than whether 3D was enabled. The image below is from the Comment #3 setup with 3D enabled.

The host native resolution is 2560 x 1440.