So I’m trying to play around with Fedora in a VM with VMWare Workstation Player (v17.5.1) but I’m running into a problem I don’t know how to solve. I use the Fedora 39 1.5 ISO file which is the most current version that’s available for download and after installing it in the VM everything works fine. I setup the install and I can use it, still working after rebooting it. But as soon as I do sudo dnf update or update everything via the Software Center the screen of the VM goes black and I can’t use the VM anymore. No matter if I reboot it or not. When I power off the VM I can see the Fedora loading icon for a short period but that’s it.
This also happened with NixOS but not with Fedora Server. I guess it must have something to do with the DE as both distros were installed with Gnome but I don’t know how to solve it. I already tried reinstalling VMWare to no avail. I will try installing a distro with KDE to maybe rule out one cause.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here? I’m running VMWare on Windows 11.
VMware went to the shitter, try with virtualbox
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.
Significantly faster too
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.
You can pass through a GPU using KVM. Probably even a crypto mining card like the NVIDIA P106L for $30.
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.
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What happened?
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.
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.
How did you come to the conclusion that I’m on Linux? I never said that.
My mistake. I read your post as you using VMWare Workstation on Fedora, not the other way around.
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.
Last I checked HyperV was pretty bad with 3d acceleration.
Likely because VMs are CPU bound. Of you want 3d acceleration you would have to pass a GPU through to the VM.
Broadcom has acquired it
Any reason you need to use VMWare ? https://www.virtualbox.org/
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.
If I remember correctly, using Virtualbox itself is fine, but using the guest extensions and some other optional quality of life improvements that are needed to make Virtualbox useful are is not.
Oracle makes money with complicated licensing agreements, but their limitations for businesses are stated in their terms somewhere. This stuff is why you need to be careful downloading the tools you use at home when you’re on the job. Just because you can download something, doesn’t mean you’re allowed to use it for free. There’s a good chance that Oracle could win if they actually decided to sue your employer.
Every business learns to either avoid Oracle, or to go all-in on Oracle products (usually involving hiring someone with expert knowledge of Oracle license agreements to minimise cost).
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…
only the “free” product was downloaded and their sales folks essentially accused us of lying about using it for corporate use
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)
That does sound like Oracle. How unfortunate, who would take a one-time fee of 5000 dollars over a sustained customer relationship? I’m just not Oracle enough to understand, I guess.
Now that Broadcom is in charge, companies should probably treat VMWare like they treat any Google service: support, updates, and services can disappear at any time, with barely any warning. They’ve already killed off a significant part of their products that don’t serve large corporations.
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.
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?
