vmware has suddenly started hanging or crashing my machine.  I had been 
   running 1.5.1b2; in a vain attempt to solve the problem, I upgraded 
   this morning to the latest kernel in the 1.5 branch, which identifies 
   itself is 1.5.2_ALPHA.

   The symptom is that most user-level programs (including my window 
   manager) go non-responsive when vmware is trying to sync its redo file 
   (I use undoable virtual disks).  ssh from another host hung, too, but I 
   could get a response from 'ntpq'.  Sometimes -- but not always -- I've 
   seen TCP connection attempts from outside stay in SYN_SENT state (i.e., 
   it never got an answer from an interrupt-level function on the hung 
   machine), but ping succeeded.  I've *never* seen that happen.

   At least once, the machine panicked, leaving behind the following 
   mesage on reboot:

   Jul 31 10:56:45 berkshire savecore: reboot after panic: uvm_pagedeactivate: caller did not check wire count
   Jul 31 10:56:45 berkshire savecore: no dump, not enough free space in /var/crash

   I moved /var/crash to /usr, but (of course) I haven't seen that failure 
   since then.

   The only substantive thing I changed between when vmware had been 
   working and when it started failing is that I removed a 128M SIMM.  I 
   had been getting sig11 during gcc compilations, which (according to ma
   ny folks) indicate memory errors.  I've seen no such failures since 
   removing the SIMM -- which still leaves me with 256M -- but that could 
   mean that the bad spot is now somewhere in the kernel.  (The IBM 
   diagnostics haven't found anything wrong...)

   Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.

		   --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb



This sort of thing has *always* happened to me when I run MS-WINDOWS 2000
in a virtual machine.

Basically, it appears that if things have to start to page that there is a
chance that the machine will hang.  I can almost always trigger this by
starting two vmware sessions at the same time.

And, for reasons that are not clear, when you shut down a virtual machine
that has been running MS-WINDOWS 2000, the vmware process will hang,
followed by the system.






Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
[finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]