Problem installing 14.04 in VMPlayer

Question

I'm just trying to install Ubuntu 14.04 in VMWare Player. It has a single huge (300 GB) partition and so I expect it to take some time, but after a few minutes, this message came

I'm unsure what it's doing now. Zeroing 300 GB surely takes some time, but the current disk usage is according to du only 11 GB and it doesn't change since maybe an hour. Nautilus reports 3.8 GB (I don't care why these numbers differ).

I wonder where the WRITE SAME failed comes from. All I find out is that it happens with some RAID controllers, but the partition I placed the VM on is an encrypted software RAID partition and IMHO the guest OS should care (or even know it).

The VMWare Player uses some 40% CPU and iostat 30 shows

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           4.85    0.67   10.66    0.17    0.00   83.65

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
sda              11.07         0.00       113.60          0       3408
sdb               0.80         0.00         8.27          0        248
sdc               0.80         0.00         8.27          0        248
sde               0.73         0.00         5.87          0        176
sdd               0.73         0.00         5.87          0        176
md0               0.97         0.00         7.73          0        232
dm-0              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
dm-1              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
dm-2              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
dm-3              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
dm-4              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
dm-5              0.97         0.00         7.73          0        232
dm-6              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0

I guess it means that nothing's happening as the only activity is on sda which contains the host's / and /home, but not the RAID.

An old 10.04 VM runs without problems on the same system.

What's going on? What should I do?

Answer 1

From here: http://ewen.mcneill.gen.nz/blog/entry/2014-07-17-mininet-on-ubuntu-14.04-in-kvm/

"WRITE SAME failed. Manually zeroing"

If you get reports of "WRITE SAME failed. Manually zeroing" logged to the console, they seem to be caused by this patch to the SCSI disk driver in Linux 3.7+ (and a later patch which enabled WRITE SAME via the disk mapper path from Linux 3.10 onwards), which enables use of the SCSI "WRITE SAME" command (write multiple blocks with the same content -- Linux seems to use it mostly for ensuring blocks contain all zeros).

The patch defaults to using 0xFFFF (65535) blocks for WRITE SAME, except for certain classes of disks (ATA, USB, and Firewire) which are known not to implement the feature (and will use more if SCSI READ SUPPORTED OPERATION CODES reports more). It appears that particularly for certain virtualised disks (eg, KVM, perhaps only older KVM installs -- my host machine still runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), this results in assuming WRITE SAME functionality will work even if it is not supported. (Various people have found this problem, in various kernels; it looks like there is a patch to disable it if it fails)

The work around where it is being inappropriately used is to manually set max_write_same_blocks to 0 for the underlying SCSI devices in the /sys file system -- this needs to be done each boot. The affected SCSI devices can be found with: find /sys/devices -name max_write_same_blocks

and something needs to write 0 into the file; on machines with systemd people are using /etc/tmpfiles.d to do that. For Ubuntu 14.04 it looks like the simplest solution is to create a simple script called "disable-write-same", (in /usr/local/sbin), that finds all the max_write_same_blocks files, and echos 0 into them -- then add a call to that to /etc/rc.local. (For good measure run the script immediately, to avoid rebooting.)

ETA, 2014-07-31: I also found I needed to do the same thing when installing under VMWare Fusion.

Answer 2

Whatever happend, the only consequence was the promised graphical interface didn't come up. I started it manually and that was about all.

So actually there was no problem, just a confusion. Maybe it helps someone.

I guess, this problem was related to using "easy install", which I'll avoid in the future.

Answer 3

I had the same problem and the solution was to download the VMware Tools during the installation as suggested through a pop-up dialogue which appears shortly after starting the Easy Install (it even mentioned that VMware Easy Install will fail when not doing this).