Arch Linux User Repository

After the first installation, please:

1) install the appropriate headers package(s) for your installed kernel(s): linux-headers for default kernel, linux-lts-headers for LTS kernel...

2) reboot or load vmw_vmci and vmmon kernel modules (modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon)

3) Enable the services you need (using .service units to activate them during boot or .path units to activate them when a VM is started) :

• vmware-networks: to have network access inside VMs

• vmware-usbarbitrator: to connect USB devices inside VMs

@zigo: start the command (with root privileges) "dkms install -k 4.14.8-1-ARCH vmware-workstation/14.1.0_7370693". If it doesn't fail, start "modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon" and it should work.

@jihem i have linux and linux headers version is 4.14.8-1

when i started any vm by vmware i get this error message

Could not open /dev/vmmon: No such file or directory. Please make sure that the kernel module `vmmon' is loaded.

and when i execute the command modprobe -a vmmon i get this error

"modprobe: WARNING: Module vmmon not found in directory /lib/modules/4.14.8-1-ARCH"

@zigo: I'm not sure, but I guess you don't have the same version of linux and linux-headers packages (one is 4.14.5 and the other is 4.14.8). Please update your system (pacman -Syu) before trying to reinstall the package.

i have this error when installing vmware-workstation 14.1.0-4

==> No kernel 4.14.5-1-ARCH modules. You must install them to use DKMS!

==> dkms remove vmware-workstation/14.1.0_7370693 -k 4.14.8-1-ARCH

any help please

I've tested a VM on Fedora with VMware encryption and UEFI. I am full SSD on my laptop and I didn't see any loss of performances compared to other VMs. iotop showed me good values (with peaks at more than 150MB/s during Fedora installation).

In my opinion, the main problem is that you use an NTFS partition. NTFS driver use FUSE which has bad performances. Maybe it is particularly bad on big files with a lot of random accesses (but I don't know why there are differences with BIOS/UEFI and encryption). So, I think you should also make tests to compare performances on ext4/ntfs.

Also, I made my tests on linux-zen, which includes some optimizations for desktop use. You could test this kernel too.

I think I know what the problem is, but I don't have a solution. Based on a few tests I did with recently created VMs, the slow startup happens when I simply encrypt the VM (using VMware's built-in encryption tool), and most importantly when I choose UEFI over BIOS in the VM's options. You can try it for yourself and see if you can reproduce this issue. I have a decent PC (i5 3570k, 8GB RAM, GTX 660), and yet VMware takes about two minutes to start an EMPTY Ubuntu VM with 20GB of encrypted storage. It's worth noting that I have all my VMs on a 1TB HDD (NTFS filesystem). I've also monitored the I/O data on my HDD while I'm booting that VM, and here's how it looks (note the peak writing usage, it's 180.1 kilobytes, yet the disk utilization % is at 100!!!): https://i.imgur.com/IYmAUH9.png

Now, I don't think my HDD went bad because I also did a benchmark test and it looks fine, here's the result: https://i.imgur.com/PO82lwK.png

Thing is, when the VM is booting, browsing files on that HDD is nearly impossible, because it's painfully slow. I've checked VMware's log files but I couldn't find anything relevant as well. I have a SSD too, but I haven't tried setting up a VM on it yet, but I'll try to do that tomorrow and reproduce this.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

@gbr: yes, you should. This file is automatically generated by VMware if it doesn't exist, but I decided to include it directly in the package.

Did you finally solve your problem of slow VMs on Linux 4.14?

I'm getting this error while trying to update from 14.1.0-1 to 14.1.0-3:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)

vmware-workstation: /etc/vmware-vix/bootstrap exists in filesystem

Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Should I use --force to install it?

@jihem Thank you for your time. I created another OVA file, and this time it works.