[CentOS] CentOS 5 Issues Booting Under VMWare

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 6/5/07, hkclark at gmail.com <hkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> VMWare has been a great tool for me to experiment with CentOS 3 and
> CentOS 4.  However, I'm running into issues with CentOS 5.  First, it
> is *extremely* slow to boot (as in it takes over an hour to boot
> CentOS 5 on a machine that boots CentOS 3 & 4 in less than one
> minute).  Then, after an hour of slowly watching the messages go by on
> the console and the CPU of the host machine pegged at 100%, I get this
> error:
> VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
> NOT_REACHED F(562):1742
> A log file is available in ...
>
> I have done a "minimal install" of CentOS 5 (all checkboxes in the
> category/task selection screen are unchecked -- so to X-Windows
> involved) and the virtual machine has 750MB of RAM.  I'm using VMWare
> Workstation 4.5 and the host OS is Windows XP Pro.  I have not been
> able to install the VMWare tool since I can't get it to finish
> booting.
>

Ok I was first going to say I could not replicate this.. but then saw
that the host OS is Windows XP which I do not have access to. However,
vmware workstation only supports the 2.6 kernel on Workstation 5.0 and
above. Early 2.6 kernels are known to work on Workstation-4.5 on some
hardware but a lot of systems had the problems you are listing when
trying to run Workstation-4.x with CentOS-4.

I think you are either going to need to update to a newer version of
workstation (looking at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware

OS support

64-Bit Solaris 10 1/06 (Update 1) and Solaris 10 6/06 (Update 2) fail
with a triple fault on Intel Pentium M-based systems Merom, Woodcrest,
and Conroe. A Sun Microsystems' blog has published a workaround for
this issue.

Older versions of VMware seem unable to run newer versions of Linux
(2.4-series kernels seem to panic when run on VMware 2.x; and
2.6-series kernels, when run on VMware 3.x, give a protection error).
VMware Workstation in Nov 2006 reached version 5.5.3, which supports
these newer operating systems and kernels. However, the latest
versions of the 2.6.x kernel require a patch to use all the VMware
features \u2014 even when using VMware Workstation 5.0 or 5.5. This
patch, freely available as vmware-any-any-updatexxx (as of 2007-04-16:
update109), comes via the Czech Technical University.




-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"