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

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.

@viljeml: I've updated the package with python2-six dependency. It will fix your problem.

@hunk: I have never used i3 or any other tiling WM, I don't know if it can change anything. I use xfce, if you want to test on this desktop environment.

To get more information about the error, you can start VMware from a terminal and see if it display an error when you try to import your file. You should also search informations on log files. They are stored in /tmp/vmware-$USER. Just read files whose name contains the number corresponding to the PID of VMware currently running.

@timofonic: I use linux-zen as default kernel and I don't have your problem.

Firstly, try to uninstall modules (dkms remove -k 4.14.8-1-zen vmware-workstation/14.1.0_7370693) before reinstall them (dkms install -k 4.14.8-1-zen vmware-workstation/14.1.0_7370693).

Now, when you start command "dkms status" on a terminal, do you see the line "vmware-workstation, 14.1.0_7370693, 4.14.8-1-zen, x86_64: installed"? Does the module files exist (/usr/lib/modules/4.14.8-1-zen/kernel/drivers/misc/vmmon.ko and /usr/lib/modules/4.14.8-1-zen/kernel/drivers/net/vmnet.ko)?

If you used bundle installation before trying this package, maybe some modules are still installed and cause conflicts. On /usr/lib/modules/4.14.8-1-zen directory, search and remove following files: vmmon.ko, vmci.ko, vmnet.ko, vmblock.ko and vsock.ko (but don't touch those have extension .gz or .xz). And retry the dkms command to install modules.

=> Patching VMware for macOS guest support Traceback (most recent call last): File "/tmp/yaourt-tmp-vili/aur-vmware-workstation/src/unlocker.py", line 47, in <module> import six ImportError: No module named six ==> ERROR: A failure occurred in package(). Aborting... ==> ERROR: Makepkg was unable to build vmware-workstation.</module>