Fusion ARM: Rhel 9, Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 VM installation is failing

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

To inform the user about the issue and its workaround.

Symptoms:
As a result of the Black screen appearing indefinitely, OS installation in the Guest VM is not getting completed.

Cause

Linux kernels before 5.18 or maybe even 5.19 couldn't handle a PCI bar reservation handover from the builtin fb drivers (efi, simplefb, vgaarb, whatever) to a dedicated driver that's loaded as a module (e.g. vmwgfx). And the way loading of the fb drivers works on Linux is that when a driver dedicated for the given PCI id is found then the built-in is removed (e.g. efifb), then the dedicated one is loaded. The dedicated drivers couldn't be loaded on the arm because the unloaded fb drivers weren't releasing the PCI ranges correctly and the built-in was already unloaded, so the system was ending up without any working fb driver.

Resolution

On ARM64 systems prefer distributions running on kernel 5.19.0 or newer, where this is fixed

Workaround:
The user has to perform the below steps for the GOS installation to go through successfully-

1. Immediately after RHEL 9(or above) VM or Fedora 35(or above) or Ubuntu 22.04 is created and the VM gets powered on, once the booting starts, select “Troubleshooting”.
2. In the next screen, press “E” key, and in the 3rd line replace “inst.rescue” with “modprobe.blacklist=vmwgfx” for Rhel 9 or above VM.(Replace "nomodset quiet rhgb" with “modprobe.blacklist=vmwgfx” for Fedora 35 or above VM) and adding “modprobe.blacklist=vmwgfx” to the grub boot line for Ubuntu 22.04
3. Press Control + X, booting should start successfully and the installation should get completed.

This issue is not seen with the latest daily-live image of Ubuntu 22.04.1.

The official statement from Ubuntu is that they will update to Kernel Version 5.15.53 soon (which fixes boot and makes 2d work) but the installers for 22.04 will not be updated until January 2023, so 22.04 will not be easily installable until then. Current 22.04 is on Kernel Version 5.15.47 which doesn't work.