VMWare black screen after installing all updates with Fedora Linux

moonpiedumplings, 2 months ago

I remember this being brought up with an acquaintance, but basically there’s a bug where the newest fedora kernel isn’t compatible with VMWare.

So yeah. Either wait for a kernel patch, or wait for VMWare to fix their stuff. But they might not, other users have mentioned that they’ve gone downhill after being bought by Broadcom.

If you want 3d acceleration on virtualized Linux guests, other than vmware, you have two options:

• GPU passthrough
• Virtual gpu (virgl/virtualgl/egl-headless)

The latter is basically only going to work on a Linux host, virtualizing Linux guests (although it is possible on windows, with caveats).

The other downside is that no matter which option you pick, it’s all going to end up being a bit more tinkering (either a little — assign a vm a gpu, or a lot, install unsigned windows drivers), compared to VMWare’s “just works”/one click 3d acceleration setup.

lurch, 2 months ago

Did you try switching VT (Send Ctrl+Alt+F3 or other F-keys) or change graphics settings of the VM?

Did you try to kill Xserver, if any (careful, don’t kill the outside X, but it’s Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, if enabled)?

Did you try magic sysrq?

lemmyreader, 2 months ago

Any reason you need to use VMWare ? www.virtualbox.org

badamsz, 2 months ago

Just be careful if you download this from a corp internet address, which someone did on our guest network. Oracle sent us an an invoice for $5000 and pestered us about it for about a year of us ignoring them. We now block Oracle sites and I try to avoid Oracle products like the plague.

skullgiver, 2 months ago

deleted_by_author

badamsz, 2 months ago

That was my impression as well but as far as we could tell, only the “free” product was downloaded and their sales folks essentially accused us of lying about using it for corporate use. We referred them to the lawyers. Due to this and Java licencing jumping up dramatically again for a bare handful of actual users we have since ended all of our support agreements and banned use of Oracle products. They are too great a financial threat to the business.

VMWare by Broadcom is going to be… interesting…

ulu_mulu, 2 months ago

only the “free” product was downloaded and their sales folks essentially accused us of lying about using it for corporate use

According to Virtualbox site:

This VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License governs your access to and use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack. It does not apply to the VirtualBox base package and/or its source code, which are licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License “GPL”

Extension Packs are also free to download, are you sure a pack wasn’t downloaded as well? Oracle salesmen would have no ground otherwise (Virtualbox itself is GPL 2)

LinusWorks4Mo, 2 months ago

VMware went to the shitter, try with virtualbox

avidamoeba, 2 months ago

The free options haven’t turned to shit yet, but I’m absolutely expecting it to happen or to become non-free. I switched all my Windows VMs to KVM/virt-manager last week for this reason.

possiblylinux127, 2 months ago

Significantly faster too

avidamoeba, 2 months ago

Not the graphics. 🥹

That said VMware Player has a defect that sometimes causes memory drfragger on Linux to go nuts slowing the VMs down a lot.

737, 2 months ago

You can pass through a GPU using KVM. Probably even a crypto mining card like the NVIDIA P106L for $30.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

avidamoeba, 2 months ago

GPU passthrough is awesome where needed and practical but it’s not an option for many setups and often it’s not needed. Basic graphics acceleration is useful to get the user interface of Windows to behave nicely. To have using MS Excel not feel like you haven’t installed your graphics driver. With Windows on KVM the missing bit is just the Windows drivers for virtio graphics. On Linux, the drivers are already there and Linux on KVM has basic graphics acceleration. That’s all I wish for. 🥹 AFAIK there’s an active PR for the Windows virtio graphics driver but it’s not done yet.

Tywele, 2 months ago

What happened?

ReversalHatchery, 2 months ago

Broadcom has acquired it

slazer2au, 2 months ago

Long story short VMware was purchased by Broadcom and have said they only care about the top 600 customers and the rest can do their own thing.

Since the acquisition Broadcom has increased prices by at least 2x, increased the minimum purchase number to be a partner, discontinued the free ESXi hypervisor, and are looking for someone to purchase the consumer product line like Workstation.

Your other options are Virtual Box by Oracle or head down the Xen path.

lemmyng, 2 months ago

Your other options are Virtual Box by Oracle or head down the Xen path.

Or, since OP is on Linux, a native KVM option like virt-manager or boxes.

Tywele, 2 months ago

How did you come to the conclusion that I’m on Linux? I never said that.

slazer2au, 2 months ago

What version of Win 11 are you on? If you have the non home version you should look at enabling HyperV and use that for virtualization.

Tywele, 2 months ago

Last I checked HyperV was pretty bad with 3d acceleration.

slazer2au, 2 months ago

Likely because VMs are CPU bound. Of you want 3d acceleration you would have to pass a GPU through to the VM.

lemmyng, 2 months ago

My mistake. I read your post as you using VMWare Workstation on Fedora, not the other way around.