vmware
Using VMware's Drag-And-Drop Feature Under Gnome on Wayland on Debian 11 Leads to Freezes
Describe the bug
The Gnome desktop environment on virtual machines running Debian 11 "Bullseye" will randomly freeze during use, when Drag-And-Drop is enabled, even when Drag-And-Drop did not seem to be used in any way.
The logs of sudo dmesg and sudo journalctl show no temporally corresponding error message.
Reproduction steps
- Freshly setup and install a Debian 11 amd64 VM (I haven't tested i386.)
- Ensure that
Enable drag and dropis activated underOptions -> Guest Isolation - Start your VM
- Ensure that you log into your user session with Wayland by clicking the cog wheel in the lower right corner and selecting
GNOME (not GNOME on Xorg)if necessary - Open a terminal, enter
sudo journalctlto get some console output. - Scroll to the end, possibly by using the End key and select some text.
- Leave the text selected and click on the power menu in the upper right corner.
Expected behavior
The Gnome desktop will freeze and become unresponsive, even to CTRL+ALT+DEL, but will still react to a reboot or shutdown event via ACPI.
Additional context
Environment
- Host OS: Windows 10 21H2
- Hypervisor Version: VMware Workstation Pro 16.2.4
- Guest OS: Debian 11 amd64
- Open VM Tools Version (
open-vm-tools,open-vm-tools-desktop): 2:11.2.5-2+deb11u1
Observations
- The UI freezes and does not react to user input anymore.
- Without or with disabled GPU acceleration the bug seems to occour faster and more frequent.
- Graphically intensive operations, like resizing the desktop window seem to accelerate the occourence of bug to a limited extent.
- The VM does not react to CTRL+ALT+DEL.
- The VM can still be shut down or restarted properly with a press on "Shut Down Guest" or "Restart Guest".
- Access via SSH is still possible.
- There do not seem to be any correlating messages in the output of
sudo dmesg. - There do not seem to be any timely correlating messages in
sudo journalctl. These error messages do not seem to timely correlate with the occourence of this bug. - The bug appears regardless of the used firmware (BIOS or UEFI).
- The bug seems to appear exclusively with Gnome on Wayland on Debian 11.
- Using Gnome on Xorg does not seem show this behaviour.
- Gnome on Wayland under Debian 10 does not seem to have this bug.
- Activating the following settings might increase the occourence of this bug:
- Virtualize Intel VT-X/EPT or AMD-V/RVI
- Virtualize CPU performance counters
- Virtualize IOMMU (IO memory management unit)
- The bug seems to be related to and/or caused by the Drag-And-Drop-Feature of VMware.
Workarounds
- Disable Drag-And-Drop, if you need to start your user session with GNOME on Wayland.
- Start your user session with GNOME on Xorg, if you need Drag-And-Drop.
Possibly Related Issues
- #592
- #565
- #559
- #571
There is an existing internal bug for this issue. I have contacted the group responsible for Wayland support and have asked them to provide an ETA for the fix. Please stay tuned.
Unfortunately, no, there is not. I am escalating the internal bug. Thanks!
Just wanted to say thank you for finding / reporting this bug and all the info about it. We are also suffering from this and whatever we have tested we observed the same things (but we did not test the firmware for example). We are really looking forward to a bugfix. Thanks again for working on this.
@dsouders Still no news so far? Could You escalate the bug even further, please?
I do think the bug appeared at some time between the earliest iteration of version branch 10 und and the latest iteration of version branch 11.2.5 of the Open VM Tools. https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/compare/stable-10.0.5...stable-11.2.5
Potentially bad commits:
- Wayland Copy & Paste/DnD (These three seem to be the most likely commits to me.):
- 8532fc18fe4acbb3f1df354fa3f94bf7d4581adc
- 00087edfaec951fb7330843282a0fe20128fbb56
- f00ecc833139a651edf936d7b4c01bfd1504908f
- 99af79200f91c246580197b5698995fba4dc47af
- 2abf659307e6c660f94c77ea9f40f679f0a7130d
- 8c69b930a826aad87c692d516fd77d1a4cbed0fb
- 0c15fb2cea00bef03738343f08df0aa837591116
- 9c30be3448c743e51718480543142bf833ea553a
- 000856aea0bd78c581888c3e3771cf79c6fdb7e9
@dkierner-dh
There is some activity on the bug now due to the previous escalation. I've added your comments above, reiterated that it is an important customer issue, and requested an update.
Thanks!
@dsouders This is affecting developers in my company on both Fusion and Workstation Pro, and we pay for quite a few licenses for both. It's a big productivity impact so we've been considering other VM solutions, but would love if this is resolved instead.
Just updated to VMWARE Workstation Pro 17.5.0 and this issue is still plaguing a development team I work with. Please fix!
Win11 host (all updates applied) Debian 11 guest (all updates applied)
Hello,
Thank you for your extraordinary patience.
@dsouders Any updates to this issue? It's still ongoing in 2024.
From what I can tell, no progress has been made. Apologies, the responsible team for this feature have not responded to our requests. I will continue to prod them.
@lousybrit Thank you, whatever you can do to prioritize resolving this would be appreciated. My org pays for ~100 VMware Workstation and Fusion licenses (as well as other products), but issues such as this one in particular are making me consider alternatives. I'm a dev and completely understand that bugs happen... it's the time to resolution that's the issue.
Update. the work has been scheduled and there appears to be some traction.
Ubuntu 24.04 as been released with Wayland too. So the bug is present for a large community now I guess.
To motivate the devs behind this project to set an higher priority on this fix I'm happy to offer this very cute kitten picture:
Edit: Workaround: use a shared folder between VM and host
