Hello,
Adding a serial port to my VMs has increased boot time from 2 minutes to 5 minutes, even after removing the serial port and re-installing VMware tools. Earlier today, they booted in less than two minutes, and another VM whose configuration I have not changed, still does boot in that time.
I'm running VMware Workstation 9.0.0 build-812388 for Linux. I tried following some Windows-oriented directions for ws55 to debug one guest from another:
Examples: Debugging over a Virtual Serial Port
I specified /tmp/vm-name-comX as the socket for each, with the debug target as the server, and the debugger VM as the client.
Reviewing the logs, I see this:
2013-07-16T16:18:32.766-06:00| vcpu-0| I120: UHCI: Global Reset 44s 2013-07-16T16:19:16.964-06:00| vmx| I120: GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox-dnd timed out. 50s 2013-07-16T16:20:06.668-06:00| vcpu-1| I120: CPU reset: soft (mode 2) 2013-07-16T16:20:11.230-06:00| vcpu-0| I120: SVGA: Unregistering IOSpace at 0x10d0 2013-07-16T16:20:23.657-06:00| vthread-20| I120: VTHREAD start thread 20 "vthread-20" pid 17125 20s 2013-07-16T16:20:43.987-06:00| vmx| I120: Tools: Tools heartbeat timeout. 35s 2013-07-16T16:21:18.235-06:00| vmx| I120: GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out. 2013-07-16T16:21:18.235-06:00| vmx| I120: Vix: [17064 guestCommands.c:1926]: Error VIX_E_TOOLS_NOT_RUNNING in VMAutomationTranslateGuestRpcError(): VMware Tools are not running in the guest
I've annotated (left-hand column) the longest delays I noticed. I removed the serial device, and updated VMware tools for one of these VMs, to no avail. The socket in /tmp/ doesn't seem to exist at this point.
An oddity is that, for the target VM, the serial device seemed to disappear from configuration after I added it, so I added another, and it was automatically named Serial2 (or similar). When I look in the VMX file for this machine, I still see the following lines after removing that:
serial0.present = "TRUE" serial0.fileType = "thinprint" serial1.present = "FALSE"
However, for the debugger VM, I noticed no such quirk, and there are no matching lines in its VMX file referring to serial.
Does this ring a bell for anyone in terms of something I might be able to fix? I've considered deleting the VMX files and re-importing the drives, and if that's not a difficult or lossy route, then I suppose I can try that...
Thanks,
Mike