Bug 700275

Summary:	glibc update breaks VMware workstation
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Paul Moody <pmoody>
Component:	glibc	Assignee:	Jeff Law <law>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-tools-bugs
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	5.6	CC:	fweimer, law, mfranc
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-02-14 20:47:41 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:

Description Paul Moody 2011-04-28 00:49:32 UTC

Description of problem:

After glibc update when trying to start VMware workstation.  VNware workstation crashes and the system logs me out of my current session.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

RHBA-2011:0466

How reproducible:

every time.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start vmware workstation from task bar.
2.
3.
  
Actual results: vmware workstation crashes and session ends unexpectedly.


Expected results: vmware workstation starts normally


Additional info:
VMware Workstation version: 7.1.4 build-385536
machine running on: Dell T3500

Comment 1 Andreas Schwab 2011-05-03 09:14:01 UTC

That needs to be reported to vmware.

Comment 2 Jeff Law 2012-02-14 20:47:41 UTC

There's a large number of known problems with VMware's products failing after glibc upgrades.  From my research, these appear to be VMware bugs, not glibc bugs.

The most common problem reported is the vmware-hostd process dying.

The first thing I would suggest is starting your VM, waiting for it to crash, then verifying that vmware-hostd is not running.


Please try adding "ulimit -c unlimited" just before the last line of /usr/sbin/vmware-hostd to enable core file generation. When/if a crash happens again you can examine the core file by doing...

gdb /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-hostd /path/to/core_file

At the gdb prompt issue "thread apply all bt"

One of the threads will have a backtrace that likely looks like this:

#0 0xb7fd3402 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0x00909df0 in raise () from /lib/libc.so.6
#20x0090b701 in abort () from /lib/libc.so.6
#3 0x0094ddc7 in free_check () from /lib/libc.so.6
#4 0x0094aa5b in free () from /lib/libc.so.6
#5 0xb76db211 in operator delete () from /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libstdc++.so.6/libstdc++.so.6
#6 0xb7db9cb1 in Vmomi::PropertyCollectorImpl::FilterImpl::AfterComputeUpdate () from /usr/lib/vmware/vmacore/libvmomi.so.1.0


This failure is a bug in VMware, not glibc.  More specifically it has either corrupted the heap or freeing the same memory more than once.