Extremely slow guests in VMWare Workstation on Fedora 43 KDE Plasma host

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1

SOLVED : Solution was to move to Manjaro Linux. It’s simply FAST. My God, it’s full of stars! :') It seems it was a Fedora problem rather than VMWare. The Fedora guest is much faster and usable now as well. Thank you.

FINALLY MOVED TO LINUX! SUCH A BREATH OF FRESH AIR! Pardon my capslock, BUT IT’S SO GOOD! :D, so… the problem:

The setup is a laptop, Intel 14700HX [HyperThreading OFF, C-States OFF, Assigned 8 Performance Cores] (with built-in gpu), extra discrete Nvidia RTX 4070, 96GB RAM (MSI), running Fedora 43 KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland), fully up to date. Installed akmod nvidia drivers as well. (Set to performance mode, not battery saver)

So I have extremely slow Linux (Fedora or any dist) guests in VMWare Workstation on Fedora 43 KDE Plasma host. The mouse stuttering badly and feels very heavy. Animations stutter. RDP into it, just “forget about it”. I tested installing a Windows 11 guest in this thing, the mouse is buttery smooth like native, the Windows itself is kind’a slow but “ok”. Linux is just veeeeeeeeery slow.

I’ve install openvm-tools openvm-tools-desktop in the Fedora 43 KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland) guest.

I don’t want to go with XORG X11 etc., because they are kind’a retiring it (Fedora) so I need this thing to be buttery smooth with Wayland.

The machine isn’t slow obviously, enough RAM and everything. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong here. Am I missing something? I would think Linux guest under Linux would been fast but seems no?

One thing I noticed is, the guests are using the built-in GPU instead of the Nvidia, can that be the issue here? How do I set it to use my Nvidia instead?

I can deal somewhat with a half slow guest but my God, the mouse laggy stutter is horrible. Drives me nuts!

I appreciate any help if you can. Thank you.

Actually, I think VMWare “is” running on Nvidia? But in system monitor I see the built-in active when things happening in the VM. Strange.

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02 Driver Version: 580.119.02 CUDA Version: 13.0 |
±----------------------------------------±-----------------------±---------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 … Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| N/A 56C P8 2W / 55W | 459MiB / 8188MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
±----------------------------------------±-----------------------±---------------------+

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1986 G /usr/bin/kwin_wayland 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 6451 G …share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam 3MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 6715 G ./steamwebhelper 28MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 6752 C+G …am/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper 5MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 11151 C+G /usr/lib/vmware/bin/mksSandbox 311MiB |
±----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

2

I tried Linux Mint and CachyOS, both have very smooth mouse movements (live CD), but Fedora live CD stuttering A LOT, like it’s heavy. So I guess something is wrong with Fedora?

3

Other odd thing, in those distros that the mouse is smooth, if I set the mouse to size 54, then it starts to become laggy stuttery but anything below that size is smooth. Makes no sense. Very odd behaviour.

4

Are you forced to use VMware? If not consider migrating your VMware VMs to libvirt.

If you create a VM using the libvirt Virtual Machine Manage (VMM) are those VMs slow?
Creating a Fedora Plasma VM would do for testing.

FYI: add your use to the libvirt group then log out and bck in again so that you have easy access to VMM to create and run the VMs.

If that works well it suggests there is an issue with VMWare itself.

5

Thank you for the reply. Well, since other distros don’t stutter and only Fedora does, seems it’s Fedora. I moved the host to Manjaro, it’s UNBELIEABLY fast now. Even Fedora guest under VMWare with Manjaro host is very very fast, almost like native. Decided to move the guest to Manjaro though because seems to me Fedora has some real performance issues. At least on my machine.

Cheers!

6

Assuming this is VMware Workstation 25H2:

On the host check near the top of mksSandbox.log in the VM’s folder. It’ll enumerate display devices then give something like:

2026-02-18T10:37:26.756Z INFO(05) mks  Vulkan Renderer: Using device 0 of 3

Section 3.4 of the Arch Wiki spells out how to enforce device selection, at least in the case of Vulkan and not one of the legacy display methods.

Most likely you’ll want something like mks.vk.ForceDevice = "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060" in the VM’s .vmx file – get the exact text string for your system from mksSandbox.log.

I’ve never achieved better than ~16fps in a Libvirt+QEMU guest that didn’t involve a complex, fragile, and inflexible PCI passthru setup. With VMware Workstation I’m seeing 60fps. A choppy and imperfect 60fps, but still… The best setup involved the QXL-DOD RHEL abandonware and it went downhill from there. The virtgpu/VirGL stuff was alpha quality at best. Maybe it’s gotten better recently…

I went on a distro tourism rampage 2-3 years back and found most distro maintainers DGAF about their out-of-box experience on VMware. No two distros had exactly the same pathology either. I recall using ONE where the VMware paravirtual drivers were present and active both in the liveCD installer and in a fresh install (don’t recall which).

At the time open-vm-tools had a systemd dependency chain pathology that didn’t help matters – I think this is fixed now.

I’ll speculate VMware Workstation couldn’t find usable display acceleration on your Fedora system. When I first switched from CachyOS to Fedora I came close to switching back during a painful slog through the whole nVidia open replaces nouveau and akmod replaces DKMS but none of this works out of the box and none of the writeups [at the time] are complete.

It’s all working now. The UFOs are happy:

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