VMWare. Windows host, Tumbleweed as guest - sluggish, mouse is jailid in VM etc

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1

Installed Tumbleweed KDE Wayland as a guest on VMWare Workstation Pro.

open-vm-tools is installed, but seems not to be working:

  • 8 core, 6 Gb RAM for the VM
  • mouse is sluggish
  • mouse is jailed in the VM, have to press AltGt+CTRL to go back into Windows
  • sound is sluggish and unusable

Any ideas how to fix it?
Tnx

2

What’s the host’s hardware configuration (how much memory is the biggest concern, but what type of CPU is also important, and whether the virtualization extensions are enabled in the BIOS).

You might need to add the open-vm-tools package in the guest. I run multiple VMs in Workstation Pro on a TW host without issue, including TW, Leap, and other Linux distros).

3

Ryzen 5800X, 32 Gb RAM. Virtualization enabled in BIOS.

As I wrote, I’m running a Windows host.

BTW KDE Neon Unstable runs just fine in other tab. So it seems to be a TB specific problem.

PS Installed TB Slowroll with same result.

4

Good info, thanks for providing it.

A couple of things to check:

  1. Make sure the open-vm-tools package is installed in the guest and that vmtoolsd.service is enabled and running.
  2. Something that might be worth trying is seeing how it performs using Xorg rather than Wayland.
  3. It shouldn’t be necessary, but you might bump the VM RAM up to 8 GB. I typically start at 8 GB, but run several of my Linux VMs at 16 GB (but I also have host RAM to spare, too)
5

Some more information:

  1. KDE Neon is on wayland and works fine.

  2. Tumbleweed SSDM (login screen) is OK, mouse moving, no sluggishness.
    As I remember it runs win X11. But for some reason it is half a screen.

    image
    image1631Ă—1145 105 KB

6

Service is running.

localhost:~> sudo systemctl status vmtoolsd.service
â—Ź vmtoolsd.service - open-vm-tools: vmtoolsd service for virtual machines hosted on VMware
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-03-25 23:20:56 EET; 2h 6min ago
 Invocation: 635df5c310e5434f89216b76cc49cc78
       Docs: http://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools
    Process: 1146 ExecStart=/usr/bin/vmtoolsd --background /run/vmtoolsd.pid (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 1168 (vmtoolsd)
      Tasks: 4 (limit: 7046)
        CPU: 4.320s
     CGroup: /system.slice/vmtoolsd.service
             └─1168 /usr/bin/vmtoolsd

ĐĽĐ°Ń€ 25 23:20:56 localhost systemd[1]: Starting open-vm-tools: vmtoolsd service for virtual machines hosted on>
ĐĽĐ°Ń€ 25 23:20:56 localhost systemd[1]: Started open-vm-tools: vmtoolsd service for virtual machines hosted on >
7

How many CPUs/cores are in the host and defined in the guest configuration?

ETA: Also, just want to confirm, what release of VMware Workstation are you using?

8

Running KDE in X11 session is fine, except sluggish sound.

So, the problem is with Wayland session.

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9

Here is the quotation:

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10

I’m setting up a test now, as I suspected that might be the issue (or part of it), as I don’t know if the video driver / HID device support in open-vm-tools supports wayland yet.

11

But it worked with KDE Neon and the sound was OK as well.

PS I tried to update a 2 month old VM and it does not boot now, so I had to delete it.

12

In that case, it might be worth reporting a bug through bugzilla.opensuse.org. Same login credentials as you use here.

It may also be that KDE Neon has an updated version of open-vm-tools - lots of potential reasons why there could be differences, but it does sound like something probably worth reporting through bugzilla.

13

I’m familiar with bugzilla. Will post here the bug number.

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14

I can confirm at least that with a Linux host, the mouse has to be manually released from the VM when wayland is in use in the guest. Though when I manually released it and then clicked back in, I was then able to freely move the mouse out of the VM window.

But I can’t reproduce the performance issues, but that could be due to hardware differences or other factors.

15

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240066

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