Any Linux using Wayland X11 manager in place of xorg boots into black screen

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Ubuntu 24.04-desktop-amd64 SMP guest operating system might take a long time to install (up to two hours with numerous error messages), might stall at boot, or might stall while running on an Intel Host.The blackscreen can happen to this linux version and higher.
This guest might stall at the following line when booting and boot into a black screen with the Ubuntu Wayland kernel.

* Loading hardware drivers...
piix4_smbus 0000:##:07.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled!

 

 

Environment

VMware ESXi 7.0

Cause

Linux VMs using Wayland, with 4MB of video memory, will not display anything. This is a bug in the Wayland release when the virtual machine video card memory is set to 4MB.

Resolution

Change the virtual machine video card memory to anything greater than 4MB.

Navigate to the ESXi host where the virtual machine resides in the vCenter Server environment.

1. Power off the virtual machine.
2. Right click on the virtual machine and select edit settings to open the Video card option
3. Verify that the total memory is set to 4 and change it to 8 MB
4. Click OK to commit the changes.
5. Power on the virtual machine.