Re: [SLUG] VMWare hates me -- guest processes hang

From: Todd (dumb-ass@acpdata.com)
Date: Mon Jul 31 2006 - 15:00:05 EDT


Just my 2 cents, - have you tried something other than ubuntu? I would
test something small (vector or dsl) to rule it to be either a unbuntu
issue or a vmware issue. If it is a vmware issue, I found the VM forums
to be very helpful.

It took 2 days but I finally have my original Windows XP partiton a
running as a guest on my SuSE host. The nice thing is that I have a
choice.- Boot to SuSE and run XP in the VMware enviroment, or choose
WinXP natively from the GRUB Menu..

Jason Boxman wrote:
> Eben King wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Jason Boxman wrote:
>>
>>
> <snip>
>
>>> I thought about it, but my laptop is a P4-based Celeron and doesn't
>>> support
>>> any MHz throttling.
>>>
>> All the more reason to disable it in the guest OS -- if it tries to lower
>> the CPU speed, VMware may try and wait, hang, or crash trying.
>>
>
> I'd be impressed if the virtual CPU advertised support for SpeedStepping or
> whatever the power stepping stuff is called these days.
>
> <snip>
>
>>> That was my first thought, but my favorite part is that wasn't happening
>>> at
>>> all. I was at most 12M in swap.
>>>
>> Out of 13M, that's probably bad; but out of 500M, I wouldn't worry. FWIW, I
>> did run my laptop for a time netbooted, with no swap, and with the drive
>> spun down. So no swap is possible, although there are analyses indicating
>> it's suboptimal. I don't know how that applies to OSes on emulated hardware
>> though.
>>
>
> It was out of 600M or somewhere thereabouts. I had tons of free RAM in
> additional to a healthy amount of cached memory allocated.
>
>
>>> Generally my CPU was always pegged in the host at 100%.
>>>
>> CPU time accounting inside VMware is wonky.
>>
>
> It seems to be -- however the host Windows 2000 SP4 system was generally
> pegged at 100% CPU by VMWare when the VM was attempting to do anything, even
> tasks that involved a minimum of disk I/O.
>
>
>>> `vmstat` reported nearly no disk access and never any I/O
>>> wait at all, just sys pegging the guest. I never could pin it on anything
>>> specifically as the host was idle. Ordinarily I'd suspect DMA was off in
>>> either the host or the guest, except it wasn't.
>>>
>> I get small writes, every second or two, with Linux 2.6.15.1 on ext3 * 5.
>> I think it's somebody updating the journal on mounted partitions with
>> something like "2006-07-31 13:23:50 no transactions".
>>
>
> I had rare writes in the two digit size from `vmstat`.
>
> I wasn't able to track down any obvious evidence of being I/O bound. The
> CPU bound issue was puzzling and there's probably a key somewhere that
> unlocks that, but I couldn't find it.
>
> I'll just end up dual booting, it seems.
>
> Of course Windows always sees my extended logical partition as a drive,
> which makes it sad. After fumbling I can usually unassign that drive
> letter. Further, /fixboot and /fixmbr fail to recover my GRUB owned MBR
> whenever I wipe the dual boot. Dual booting always causes me such pain on
> the Windows side -- hence my desire to cheat with VMWare. Oh well.
>
>
>
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