Any known problems with vmplayer and git driver?

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Fri Jan 21 11:00:18 PST 2011


2011/1/20 Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net>:
> On Don, 2011-01-20 at 12:55 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Hi,
>>    I switched to the git version of xf86-video-ati this morning and I
>> immediately noticed some improvements with things like KDE menus and
>> such. However almost immediately I started having problems with
>> VMWare's vmplayer app. Appliances that I have run for months now won't
>> run at all. Lock files are left in the appliance directories and the
>> player won't play them.
>>
>>    There have been a few other changes to this machine over the last
>> few days so I want to be careful about debugging what the root cause
>> is but they were certainly working this morning before I tried the new
>> driver.
>>
>>    At this point I'm unable to run my most important appliances.
>>
>>    I have not yet downgraded back to the normal release. I'll be doing
>> that soon.
>>
>>    Thanks in advance for any info.
>
> I'm afraid it's you who needs to provide us with more information about
> the problem... I assume the lock files are just leftovers from the
> original problem.
>
>
> --
> Earthling Michel Dänzer           |                http://www.vmware.com
> Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer
>

OK, back again and as far as I can tell the problem is real. If I open
any VM in vmplayer after having upgraded to xf86-video-ati from git
then the VM hangs and there's no good way to get back out gracefully.
I do agree that the lock files are likely just a by-product of not
closing the machine normally. emerging vmware-workstation and doing a
reconfigure seems to clear that problem up.

Here's what I did to test:

1) First, running the older xf86-video-6.13.2 I upgraded to mesa-7.10
& mesa-progs-0.8

2) Rebooted and tested glxgears. Rendering was disabled in Xorg.0.log
and FPS was about 200. glxgears -info showed I was using mesa-7.10.

3) Ran both a Virtualbox and VMware VM. Both worked fine.

4) Updated to xf86-video-ati-9999 which comes from git.

5) For safety ran module-rebuild -X rebuild which rebuilds all the
stuff I normally build after creating a new kernel.

6) Rebooted and tested glxgears. Rendering was now enabled which is
good. FPS was still at 200 which was no improvement.

7) I then ran a VMware VM which hung immediately.If you're familiar
with running VMs there's a first step where it looks like a BIOS boot
screen and then you see VMware and a bar which gets bigger to the
right over time. With the new driver installed this bar never appears
and the VM is hung.

8) Rebooted and emerged vmware-workstation again. Ran modules-rebuild
-X rebuild again. For safety rebooted.

9) Tried running the player again but it's still unable to show the
first portion of the boot screen.



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