Higher screen resolution causes freeze or black screen for Ubuntu 17.10 Wayland 2D VM with default (4MB) video memory

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• For GOS Ubuntu 17.10 Wayland desktop 32/64 bit in ESXi 6.5 or later, when increasing the screen resolution to greater than 1024x768, the screen freezes or turns black. dmesg in the GOS shows a page flip error.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Cause

This is caused due to mismatch in how surfaces are allocated and used between the vmwgfx driver and Ubuntu 17.10 Wayland desktop.

Resolution

To workaround this issue, follow one of the steps:

1. Enable 3D Support (recommended)
   • Choose the VM and Edit Settings.
   • Choose the Video card and checked the checkbox "Enable 3D Support".
2. Increase the total video memory to 16 MB or larger
   • Choose the VM and Edit Settings.
   • Choose the Video card, we can see the default memory is 4M.
   • Change the default memory 4M to 16M or larger.

Additional Information

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