VMware weirdness

I installed Vmware Server on my Gentoo 2006.0 (AMD64) box using the Gentoo Wiki instructions. I am using it to run Windows XP in a VM. It works fine, but I noticed some weird things. One was that my sound was not recognized by VMware, but the other and weirder one was that my Athlon 64 X2 CPU was being recognized as being 2.85 GHz instead of the normal 2.2 GHz. (See this screenshot for details.) I have run VMware before on different Linux hosts and it has always reported the CPU speed correctly in the Windows VM.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what could cause that? Or could it just lead to funny "I overclocked <------this much --------> screenshots?

EDIT: I am running a big dual-monitor setup and the screenshot is 2880x1200. Photobucket downscaled it, but the gist of it is that /proc/cpuinfo and cpufreqd in Gentoo report the frequency as 2200 MHz while Windows in VMware thinks that one core is 2845 MHz and the other is 2954 MHz.
 

linux_0

Splendid
I installed Vmware Server on my Gentoo 2006.0 (AMD64) box using the Gentoo Wiki instructions. I am using it to run Windows XP in a VM. It works fine, but I noticed some weird things. One was that my sound was not recognized by VMware, but the other and weirder one was that my Athlon 64 X2 CPU was being recognized as being 2.85 GHz instead of the normal 2.2 GHz. (See this screenshot for details.) I have run VMware before on different Linux hosts and it has always reported the CPU speed correctly in the Windows VM.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what could cause that? Or could it just lead to funny "I overclocked <------this much --------> screenshots?

EDIT: I am running a big dual-monitor setup and the screenshot is 2880x1200. Photobucket downscaled it, but the gist of it is that /proc/cpuinfo and cpufreqd in Gentoo report the frequency as 2200 MHz while Windows in VMware thinks that one core is 2845 MHz and the other is 2954 MHz.


That's very odd, my VMWare ID's the CPU correctly and my sound works just fine.

I added the virtual audio device under my settings set it to auto-detect and it worked.

The VM detected the audio device as an ES1371 Ensoniq Audio-PCI97

vmware.png




What version of VMWare are you using and what kind of audio hardware do you have?

Are you using the onboard audio on your KN8-SLi ?
 
I am running the latest VMware Server (build 23869.) My sound device is the standard onboard NVIDIA NForce 4 AC '97 device:

00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)

Windows recognizes a "Creative AudioPCI (ES1371, ES1373) (WDM)" sound card and says it is working properly.

And as far as the CPU speed, today Windows says that it is 2.47 GHz. However, besides the sound, everything works.
 

linux_0

Splendid
I am running the latest VMware Server (build 23869.) My sound device is the standard onboard NVIDIA NForce 4 AC '97 device:

00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)

Windows recognizes a "Creative AudioPCI (ES1371, ES1373) (WDM)" sound card and says it is working properly.

And as far as the CPU speed, today Windows says that it is 2.47 GHz. However, besides the sound, everything works.


Is VMWare set to autodetect or /dev/dsp?

Have you checked amixer to confirm the channels are not defaulting to muted?
 
I think I figured this one out and it's a VMware bug. When I first booted up the empty VM for "Other Linux 2.4" to even install DSL, it gave me an error about the sound not being found *before the DSL slpash screen even showed up.* So it can't be a guest OS problem, it's a problem with the VM.
 

linux_0

Splendid
I think I figured this one out and it's a VMware bug. When I first booted up the empty VM for "Other Linux 2.4" to even install DSL, it gave me an error about the sound not being found *before the DSL slpash screen even showed up.* So it can't be a guest OS problem, it's a problem with the VM.


That's very strange it works for me on Linux host 2.6.16-1.2108_FC4 #1 Thu May 4 23:53:49 EDT 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Have you checked here? http://www.vmware.com/community/index.jspa

Good Luck :-D
 
All I could find on VMTN was people having problems installing VMware on Gentoo as Gentoo has a different init setup than does Red Hat and most other Linuxes (i.e. I don't have rc.0.d through rc.5.d in /etc/init.) I successfully got Vmware set up on Gentoo with the help of the excellent documentation on the Gentoo site, so almost all of what was in VMTN didn't apply.

I suppose that since all I'd use VMware for anyway is to open that occasional goofed-up Windows-only junk-format document and to provide "now click on *this* button, then *this* button, it's on *that* popup..." support for my folks when they have XP problems, not having sound is not a problem.

And I have gotten VMware Player's sound to work on my laptop, but it ran Ubuntu or SuSE and was 32-bit and had a much different set of hardware than my desktop does. Hmm.
 

bmouring

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What kinda performance are you guys getting with the VMWare stuff? Right now I use qemu with the kqemu module and it does run relatively smoothly, but not as quick as I'd expect.

I am just hesitant to use it because VMWare flew me out for an interview once and stuck me with footing the lodging/food/rental car up front and paid me back some 3 months after I'd filled out their expense report... grumble grumble.... it's the principle of the thing, y'know?
 
Performance is okay- not great but okay. You also have much more powerful hardware than I do, and so does linux_0. The performance is like your CPU speed is cut in half. It also puts a high level of disk I/O requests on the disk the .vmdk sits on. But it is a very good way to run other OSes without partitioning. I have not used qemu/kqemu, so I could not give you a comparison.
 

linux_0

Splendid
What kinda performance are you guys getting with the VMWare stuff? Right now I use qemu with the kqemu module and it does run relatively smoothly, but not as quick as I'd expect.

I am just hesitant to use it because VMWare flew me out for an interview once and stuck me with footing the lodging/food/rental car up front and paid me back some 3 months after I'd filled out their expense report... grumble grumble.... it's the principle of the thing, y'know?



I agree with MU_Engineer :-D

VMWare tends to be faster than QEMU. Both are memory hogs.

To run a VM comfortably you need as much RAM as you can throw at it.

CPU wise it's not so bad but you need a lot or RAM and lots of IO.

Xen is progressing quite well too.
 

bmouring

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Xen is progressing quite well too.

Yeah, but that requires modifiying the OS, likely not going to come from Redmond.... at least with my chips that don't support VT or VIIV or Pacifica or whatever they call it. Still plenty viable for the libre OS's oth there, been playing around with that too.

From both of you're analyses, it sounds like it's about the same as QEMU with the KQEMU module. About 1/2 the speed you're expecting and pitching gobs of memory at it sprinkled with heavy disk use.

I guess for now I'll keep playing in the sandbox while also keeping Windows around dual-boot style.
 

linux_0

Splendid
Xen is progressing quite well too.

Yeah, but that requires modifiying the OS, likely not going to come from Redmond.... at least with my chips that don't support VT or VIIV or Pacifica or whatever they call it. Still plenty viable for the libre OS's oth there, been playing around with that too.

From both of you're analyses, it sounds like it's about the same as QEMU with the KQEMU module. About 1/2 the speed you're expecting and pitching gobs of memory at it sprinkled with heavy disk use.

I guess for now I'll keep playing in the sandbox while also keeping Windows around dual-boot style.



I use both, with enough RAM you hardly notice the reduced performance.

In fact VMWare is quite optimized so it does better than 50% of native speed.

:-D