163 replies to this topic

[mooman]

mooman, on 16 September 2012 - 07:55 PM, said:

Hi,

when I install vmsvga2-1.2.4 driver in my SL 10.6.8 VM and reboot, the WindowManager doesn't come up. Means, it boots and at some point I only get the boot splash (or boot log with -v) and a working mouse cursor. Nothing suspicious in vmware.log - ScreenObject and SVGA3D are enabled.

The VM runs nawcom legacy 10.8 kernel with -force64, and some weird version of vmware-tools with a VmwareGFX64.kext - I tried uninstalling vmware tools completely or just moving the kexts out of the way - same result.

Does anyone have a hint what could be the issue?

Nevermind, I found the issue. I used some ready2go 10.6.7 vmware image, and that one seems to have vmware graphics enabled (lightroom 4 trial works on it).
I did a complete as-vanilla-as-possible install on my own now, and vmsvga2 works. Auto-fit is just "one-shot" when the window manager loads and refuses to work afterwards, but that's a minor issue. Now I just need to find out how to "enable" graphics for vmsvga2.

[AxeL__17]

Hi all,
I was trying to install VMware SVGA II on a Lion (10.7.5) VM which run on Fusion 5.0.1.
The VM is hw version 8, has VM tools installed (version bundled with Fusion 5.0.1).

After installing the VMware SVGA II the VM rebooted and it hangs during the initial splash screen.
The weird thing is that the VM is actually running!!! I can ssh into it, it seems that just the windows server
doesn't come up.

Is there anything I can work on to have the VM work with SVGAII driver?

Regards
AxeL

[AxeL__17]

Guys,
following up on my previous post, by upgrading to HW ver 9, the VM SVGA II is working.
By the way the VMware stock driver VMwareGFX works both with HW ver 8 and 9.
Remember I'm on Fusion 5, VM is 10.7.5.

Digging into the problem a little bit, I log the two dmesg in the VM and noticed that in the HW ver 8
(not working) there is a line

Init: SVGA3D: 3D disabled by host.

For sake of knowledge and for the record, is there any reason why SVGA II 1.2.4 doesn't work
on HW ver. 8?

Ciao
AxeL

[Zenith432]

VMsvga2 v1.2.4 is broken in Workstation 9/Fusion 5 and has been broken in all release previews of these products.

The problem is related to screen object, and I haven't yet been able to figure it out.  Something was changed in the implementation of screen object that makes VMsvga2 show a black screen sometimes instead of rendering graphics.  This may have some relation to HW ver 8/9, but for me it shows black even with HW ver 9.

As a workaround, you can set

svga.enableScreenObject2 = "FALSE"

in the .vmx file.  This will disable screen object for the VM and make VMsvga2 fall back to rendering in "smart framebuffer" mode, which still works.

[RealNC]

Zenith432, on 08 October 2012 - 06:29 PM, said:

VMsvga2 v1.2.4 is broken in Workstation 9/Fusion 5 and has been broken in all release previews of these products.

Hmm. Works fine here though. No black screens and it's as fast as with WS8. These are fresh installs of OS X 10.6 and 10.8 on Workstation 9.0.0 under Linux. I only had the black screen problem when trying to run the already existing WS8 VMs on WS9 (upgrade virtual hardware to WS9 didn't help.) When creating new VMs and doing the fresh installs, there were no black screens with VMsvga2 v1.2.4.

[Zenith432]

RealNC, on 10 October 2012 - 12:39 PM, said:

Hmm. Works fine here though. No black screens and it's as fast as with WS8. These are fresh installs of OS X 10.6 and 10.8 on Workstation 9.0.0 under Linux. I only had the black screen problem when trying to run the already existing WS8 VMs on WS9 (upgrade virtual hardware to WS9 didn't help.) When creating new VMs and doing the fresh installs, there were no black screens with VMsvga2 v1.2.4.

VMsvga2 v1.2.4 only supports 'svga.enableScreenObject = "TRUE"'.  I'm using v1.2.5d4 built from trunk
It supports both enableScreenObject and enableScreenObject2.

So, in Workstation 9/Fusion 5

• HWVersion 8 sets ScreenObject = True and ScreenObject2 = True --> v1.2.4 and v1.2.5d4 both give black screen.
  
• HWVersion 9 sets ScreenObject = False and ScreenObject2 = True.  --> v1.2.4 works! (w/o screen object) and v1.2.5d4 gives black screen.

At any rate, the black screen is caused by attempting to use screen-object/screen-object2 and that isn't fixed.

[dida1337]

Zenith432, on 11 October 2012 - 10:24 AM, said:

VMsvga2 v1.2.4 only supports 'svga.enableScreenObject = "TRUE"'.  I'm using v1.2.5d4 built from trunk
It supports both enableScreenObject and enableScreenObject2.

So, in Workstation 9/Fusion 5

• HWVersion 8 sets ScreenObject = True and ScreenObject2 = True --> v1.2.4 and v1.2.5d4 both give black screen.
  
• HWVersion 9 sets ScreenObject = False and ScreenObject2 = True.  --> v1.2.4 works! (w/o screen object) and v1.2.5d4 gives black screen.

At any rate, the black screen is caused by attempting to use screen-object/screen-object2 and that isn't fixed.

Where can we get v1.2.5d?

[xiaopi]

Hi,

I was wondering since Workstation 9 added OpenGL functionalities to their virtual graphics for linux guest, could that be used to enable QE/CI ?
Quartz Extreme seems to only be using OpenGL cf wikipedia:
"Quartz Extreme only uses OpenGL commands, and requires a graphics card connected to an AGP 2X or faster bus (including AGP 4X, 8X, and PCI Express), supporting textures and maps of arbitrary size, since many of the renderers have no size limitation (Quartz 2D for example).It is automatically enabled on Mac systems with one of the following types of graphics cards: AMD (ATI) Radeon, AGP-based, 16MB VRAM minimum, or better // NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, 16MB VRAM minimum, or better".

I'd love to see more love dedicated to graphic support of OSX in VMs. Could even use it to debug my IOS apps without switching to my mac.
Good luck Zenith and I'm hoping to see next version of your drivers soon!
Is there a google project or similar with last sources since last files on SourceForge are a bit old now.

[Zenith432]

I fixed the bug with usage of screen-object/screen-object-2.
The latest code is on svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/vmsvga2/code/VMsvga2/trunk.  It's versioned 1.2.5d5.  Can be built with Xcode 4.5.x on MountainLion.

Update: I uploaded a prerelease v1.2.5d6 to vmsvga2-files on sourceforge.  It fixes the screen-object issues with Workstation 9/Fusion 5.  It should work on OS 10.6 - OS 10.8, though I only tested it on OS 10.8.2 w/ 64-bit kernel.
I still have some things to do with it before finalizing v1.2.5.  This interim build seems fairly stable.  The memory management has been overhauled.  It'll be in the release notes for v1.2.5.

[Ralph9]

Hi Zenith,
Great work! Seems to work pretty well - and much better than the stock graphics from vmware-tools.

Quick question though. In Mission Control view, the thumbnails are garbled (see screenshot attached), is this normal? Also, Launchpad doesn't work well compared to Lion, but I suppose this may be a QE/CI issue...

Anyway. thanks!

Attached Files

•  Screen Shot 2012-10-13 at 7.42.59 PM.png   164.98K   71 downloads

[Zenith432]

Ralph9, on 13 October 2012 - 05:52 PM, said:

In Mission Control view, the thumbnails are garbled (see screenshot attached), is this normal? Also, Launchpad doesn't work well compared to Lion, but I suppose this may be a QE/CI issue...

Neither of these bugs (thumbnails, Launchpad) is related to the driver.  I checked and there's nothing special going on with the driver during use of these features.  I don't think Apple test OS X on non-QE systems thoroughly - as a result, sometimes there are bugs in the WindowServer or applications that don't show up when QE is present - so don't get discovered.  There used to be problem with window-grab in the Grab application.  This was a bug in the WindowServer - in OS 10.8 it's fixed.

[non@me]

Hello,
I have Snow Leopard 10.6.7 installed on VMWare Workstation 9 using EasyEFI 3.1 disk.
And after installation of VMsvga2 v1.2.5d6 driver I got the following errors on boot:

kxld[net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2]: The Mach-O file is malformed: Invalid segment type in MH_OBJECT kext: 38.
Can't load kext net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2 - link failed.
Failed to load executable for kext net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2.
Kext net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2 failed to load (0xdc008016).
Dependency net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2 of kext net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2Accel failed to load.
Failed to load kext net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2Accel (error 0xdc008015).

[non@me]

Zenith432, on 16 October 2012 - 09:47 AM, said:

Please try this alternate installer.  I built it with the OS 10.7 SDK.  It may work on OS 10.6.  If it doesn't, I'll have to discontinue support for OS 10.6.

Unfortunately this one is also not working and fails with the same errors :-(

Actually the old driver ver 1.2.3 worked good on Workstation 8, all problems began after I had upgraded to VMWare Workstation 9 where non of existing VMsvga2 drivers works properly...
Is it possible to build new VMsvga2 driver that contains all fixes for VMWare Workstation 9 and compatible with OS X 10.6?

Thank you.

[Zenith432]

pomoika, on 16 October 2012 - 04:09 PM, said:

Unfortunately this one is also not working and fails with the same errors :-(

Actually the old driver ver 1.2.3 worked good on Workstation 8, all problems began after I had upgraded to VMWare Workstation 9 where non of existing VMsvga2 drivers works properly...
Is it possible to build new VMsvga2 driver that contains all fixes for VMWare Workstation 9 and compatible with OS X 10.6?

Ok, apparently this is a known bug in Xcode 4.5.x which is described here.  It builds 32-bit kexts that don't load on OS's 10.6 and 10.7.  I've uploaded a rebuilt version to sourceforge that suppresses LC_FUNCTION_STARTS.  The other offending load command (LC_DATA_IN_CODE) is still there, and there's no switch to suppress it.

This doesn't affect the 64-bit driver which should still load on OS 10.6 and 10.7.

If you need a 32-bit version, what you can do is pull the latest code from trunk (see my post #149) and build it with xcode 4.4.x or earlier. [Most recent upload to sourceforge has this problem solved.]

[Zenith432]

Good news, I found linker switches to eliminate both offending load commands.  I built a new v1.2.5d6 prerelease and uploaded it to sourceforge.  This one should work with OS 10.6 - 10.7, 32-bit and 64-bit mode.

[non@me]

This version of driver works fine.
Thank you very much, Zenith432!

[notyetthinking]

Hi... I've installed 1.2.5d6, but somehow I'm still running into the problem that it was designed to solve. When I look at the kernel logs, I get the same message that pomoika reports above: "kxld[net.osx86.driver.VMsvga2]: The Mach-O file is malformed: Invalid segment type in MH_OBJECT kext: 38."

My setup:

Ubuntu 12.04 host
VMware Player 5.0.0
Lion 10.7.5 prebuilt VMWare image
VMWare tools installed from here: http://www.mediafire.com/zackehsoul

[Zenith432]

I released VMsvga2 v1.2.5 and uploaded to SourceForge.

Release Notes for v1.2.5

• Added Support for ScreenObject2 (available Workstation 8/Fusion 4 and beyond).
  
  
• Fixed bug with use of ScreenObject/ScreenObject2 under Workstation 9/Fusion 5.
  
  
• Memory Allocation has been overhauled to support unrestricted allocation of guest RAM for CGS surfaces.  Previously VMsvga2 was limited to use of guest VRAM for this purpose. This implies guest VRAM can be reduced to its minimum value of 16000 KiB - and VMsvga2 will still provide full functionality.  guest VRAM size may be set in the VMX file as follows
  

  svga.autodetect = "FALSE"
  svga.vramSize = "16384000"
  

  
  
• Window grab in Grab application has worked since OS 10.7 due to fixes made in OS X.

I made an extensive effort to try and build v1.2.5 for Leopard - but was unsuccessful.  Current versions of ld (Xcode 4.5.x) produce kexts that can't be loaded by OS 10.5 due to alignment issues.  The installation package is for OS 10.6 - 10.8.

[Sp0oner]

Many thanks, just installed on my Mountain Lion vm and sorted out my screen resolution issues.

[Nagug]

Zenith432, on 25 October 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

I released VMsvga2 v1.2.5 and uploaded to SourceForge.

Release Notes for v1.2.5

• Added Support for ScreenObject2 (available Workstation 8/Fusion 4 and beyond).
  
  
• Fixed bug with use of ScreenObject/ScreenObject2 under Workstation 9/Fusion 5.
  
  
• Memory Allocation has been overhauled to support unrestricted allocation of guest RAM for CGS surfaces.  Previously VMsvga2 was limited to use of guest VRAM for this purpose. This implies guest VRAM can be reduced to its minimum value of 16000 KiB - and VMsvga2 will still provide full functionality.  guest VRAM size may be set in the VMX file as follows
      

  svga.autodetect = "FALSE"
  svga.vramSize = "16384000"
  

  
  
• Window grab in Grab application has worked since OS 10.7 due to fixes made in OS X.

I made an extensive effort to try and build v1.2.5 for Leopard - but was unsuccessful.  Current versions of ld (Xcode 4.5.x) produce kexts that can't be loaded by OS 10.5 due to alignment issues.  The installation package is for OS 10.6 - 10.8.

Thanks for this. Without this build, the performance was so laggy. But with this build, that is gone. its much smoother.

However..

When I set the values to my VMX file, the log file says could not retrieve the vramsize and hence setting it default value! Using vmware9 with 10.8 guest on windows 7 x64 host. Any inputs?



Thanks,
Nagu