Arch as Vmware guest broken?

Question

Hi!
For the past couple of weeks!! (ever since systemd 'upgrade') things in vmware-land have been going from bad to worse.
I have Arch setup as a guest within vmware running on a windoes host. (Also on a mac host, same problems)
Now, I migrated the system to systemd, and basically had a functioning vm (with copy & paste, timesync etc.).
There was one problem though, shared folders would not work.
More specifically when trying to 'ls' the folder (or indeed accessing it any other way) the kernel would OOPS, basically freez up.
Others are having the same problem, there's even an official bug-report with open-vm-tools.
Same problem, and here.
Bug Report for open-vm-tools.
There's a comment there about this being fixed with the latest build (9.2.2) but that is not the case.
I've also updated vmware workstation today from 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 with no change.
But thing are getting even worse.
See this bug has been preventing me from updating xorg-server & xorg-server-common from 1.13.0-3 1.13.0-4 as I was seeing the exact same issue as mentioned in the report, and as of yesterday:
libglapi (9.0-1 -> 9.0.1-1)
libegl (9.0-1 -> 9.0.1-1)
libgl (9.0-1 -> 9.0.1-1)
mesa (9.0-1 -> 9.0.1-1)
svga-dri (9.0-1 -> 9.0.1-1)
open-vm-tools (1:9.2.0-2 -> 1:9.2.2-2)
open-vm-tools-modules (1:9.2.0-3 -> 1:9.2.2-1)
compositing doesn't seem to work, or at least gnome-session loads but instantly freezes with following segfault:
(EE) BUG: triggered 'if (inSignalContext)'
(EE) BUG: log.c:484 in LogVMessageVerb()
(EE) Warning: attempting to log data in a signal unsafe manner while in signal context.
Please update to check inSignalContext and/or use LogMessageVerbSigSafe() or ErrorFSigSafe().
The offending log format message is:
VMWARE(0): vmmouse enable absolute mode
(EE)
(EE) Backtrace:
(EE) 0: /usr/bin/X (xorg_backtrace+0x36) [0x58a006]
(EE) 1: /usr/bin/X (LogVMessageVerb+0x195) [0x595345]
(EE) 2: /usr/bin/X (xf86Msg+0x8f) [0x48262f]
(EE) 3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/vmmouse_drv.so (0x7f1c760e2000+0x194f) [0x7f1c760e394f]
(EE) 4: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x75987) [0x475987]
(EE) 5: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x9eff8) [0x49eff8]
(EE) 6: /usr/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x7f1c7dc49000+0xf1a0) [0x7f1c7dc581a0]
(EE) 7: /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (__select+0x13) [0x7f1c7c995f13]
(EE) 8: /usr/bin/X (WaitForSomething+0x190) [0x587430]
(EE) 9: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x37b41) [0x437b41]
(EE) 10: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x2692a) [0x42692a]
(EE) 11: /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (__libc_start_main+0xf5) [0x7f1c7c8d7725]
(EE) 12: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x26c6d) [0x426c6d]
(EE)
I can run i3 (no compositing) without such problems though, in fact I'm posting from it right now...
EDIT:
I forgot one further problem.
On shutdown/reboot the system hangs, as mentioned here
So, has anyone else got some or all of these issues, knows of any solutions?
Last edited by hungerfish (2012-11-19 13:07:04)

Answer 1

So, finally some success - problem now is I don't know what actually solved it.
I managed to get Shared folders to work!!
Now either this just started working after the last kernel upgrade (3.6.6-1 -> 3.6.7-1) OR It's down to this small configuration detail I took away from your config p0x8!!!
I noticed you were giving the name of your share (.host:/docs, whereas I was omitting it. Adding the correct name resulted in me being able to access my shared folder.
For completeness:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/mnt-hgfs.automount
[Unit]
Description=Load VMware shared folders
ConditionPathExists=.host:/Shared
[Automount]
Where=/mnt/hgfs
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/mnt-hgfs.mount
[Unit]
Description=Load VMware shared folders
ConditionPathExists=.host:/Shared
[Mount]
What=.host:/Shared
Where=/mnt/hgfs
Type=vmhgfs
#Options=defaults,noatime
Options=uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=0113,dmask=0022,permissions,nodev,nosuid,exec,nls=utf8,noatime
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Maybe I'll downgrade the kernel just to see if it still works, but if that's not the case, this is a bug, as I can omit the Shared folder's name in an ubuntu-guest for instance.
Thanks again for trying this out p0x8!!
UPDATE:
I went ahead and downgraded the kernel, and can now confirm that the problem was down to this configuration issue, not the kernel.
The issues remaining are gnome3's shell is broken, I am forced to use fallback-mode (great that its still around imho, because things DO break), the latest update to xorg-server and xorg-server-common cause X to crash instantly(version 1.13.1-1 works), and the shut-down delay.(see a few posts down)
Last edited by hungerfish (2012-12-18 18:31:23)