Mate 16.10 doesn't play nice with VMware workstation Pro 12.5.0

Support & Help Requests
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#1

I just wanted to let you know that I’m experiencing this weird issue where VMware says “the cpu has been disabled by the guest operating system” after freshly installing ubuntu mate 16.10 amd64.

Ubuntu 16.10 work until i have to reboot, that’s when i get prompted that " the cpu has been disabled…"

On all subsequent reboots, the VM starts, then goes past the grub menu, and stay stuck on a black screen. At this point the VM is as good as dead, and i have to forcibly poweroff / reset it.

I thought the VMware easy install mode could somehow cause the problem so i created another VM and installed mate 16.10 following the regular installer. This VM suffered the same problem after initial reboot.

The virtual machine settings are as follow : single processor with 2 cores allocated to the VM, 20gigs disk space, 4Gigs RAM, session autologin enabled otherwise i can’t go past the session manager screen, the screen becomes totally unresponsive and doesn’t accept any keyboards inputs.

I narrowed it down to mate 16.10 because i don’t have this problem with ubuntu mate 16.04, VMs created with the later works great, no CPU issues to report.

#2

By any chance, is there an EFI or UEFI mode enabled in the VM’s properties?

In 16.10, there is a bug (that might be fixed now) which could be responsible for the faulty boot, but it’s only a guess.

Booting the image on UEFI hardware may fail to complete, only showing a blank screen.

This is caused by an issue with the UEFI Shim and has been reported to fail on ThinkPad laptops as well as in QEMU virtual machines. Other devices may also be affected. This issue is expected to be resolved for the final release. (LP: #1624096)

– https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-yakkety-final-release/

#3

Thanks for getting back to me lah7,

Unfortunately “Boot with EFI instead of BIOS” is unchecked by default for every new VM creation, i’m using the regular BIOS.

I will start from scratch with a 1 single processor / single core / 2Gigs RAM and see what happen.

edit : Using the configuration describded above, it seems to work ! I also choosed to ignore updates and optional multimedia packages at the beginning of the installation. I will now apply all available updates and test further.

edit2 : The VM keep working, even after applying the updates. This seems to suggest an incompatibility with multiple virtual cores. I’m off to reinstall a VM using a single processor with 2 cores, 20gigs disk space and 4Gigs RAM. All this with no updates during installation. i should report back soon

edit3 : sure enough, after 2 reboots, the VM is stuck during startup, nothing but a black screen. Downgrading the number of allocated cores from 2 to 1 fix the issue, the VM boot and work steadily even after several reboots.
Upgrade it again from 1 core to 2 cores and the VM go haywire !. The last things i have been able to read during boot was “pii_x4_smbus : SMBus Host Controller not enabled !”

edit4 (final) : i played a little further with the number of allocated processors and the number of allocated cores, anything greater than 1 processor / 1 core will crash the VM at various stages during boot.

#4

I have the same problem on an HP laptop with VMware workstation 12.5.2 build-4638234
Fresh install of 16.10, gets to the desktop then hangs. One CPU core/2GB RAM
16.04 was okay. 16.10 is working on same version of VMWare on a desktop PC with settings for 4 cores/4GB but it was an upgrade 16.04 -> 16.10. Also, desktop PC VM keeps asking to reinstall VMware tools which I have done several times.