a journal of interesting technical ideas . . . a journal of interesting technical ideas . . .
That’s a little dramatic, but I have had a fit with VMWare Workstation and want to pass along what I’ve learned. I recently upgraded my desktop and VMWare performance went in the dump.
I’m running Pop!_OS 21.10 using kernel 5.15. I’m using VMWare Workstation 16.2.1 (latest as of early January 2022). Since I do a lot with virtualization, I have 64GB of RAM. I was running a Gen 6 i7 and recently upgraded my processor and motherboard to get to gen 12. Wow! What a difference! Everything runs super-fast, but VMWare suddenly became anemic.
Workstation has trouble running on recent kernels. Michal Kubeček maintains a repository with kernel patches. Download the patch from GitHub - instructions are included in the repository. You’ll know this worked because VMWare boots.
The ultimate fix was to tell VMware not to swap memory, since I have plenty. To do this, run Workstation as root:
sudo -i vmware
Go to Edit > Preferences and under “Memory” select “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”.
I searched all over the Internet and tried a dozen different things to fix this. I know this is a short article, but I wanted to make sure that others had a less frustrating time!