Problem with VMWare

Discussion of bugs and problems found in Altap Salamander. In your reports, please be as descriptive as possible, and report one incident per report. Do not post crash reports here, send us the generated bug report by email instead, please.
Robby
Posts: 11
Joined: 18 Aug 2006, 10:41

Problem with VMWare

Post by Robby »

I'm using several VMWare systems on my laptop to seperate different usage scenarios. As I want to use Salamander within the VMWare systems as well, I installed it on my drive D on my laptop system. All VMWare's drive D are mapped to the laptop's drive D. Hence, I have the same structure on the filesystem. Of Course the configuration in the registry is per VMWare system.

Further I use the suspend mode for my VMWare systems.

When I restore a VMWare system that has a running Salamander, it takes about 10 seconds and Salamander just vanishs. Without any error message or anythign. It just terminates.

Some version information:
- SS 2.5 RC1
- VMWare 5.5.1 Build 19175
Does anybody know this effect? Or has an idea how to track down what's happening?
Jan Rysavy
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Post by Jan Rysavy »

My idea: when you start Salamander (or another application) from the network drive or USB drive and then broke network connection or remove USB stick, the running process just vanish. You can minimize application, broke connection, and restore it to reproduce this problem.

It depends on PE (EXE/DLL) structure. Smaller applications doesn't suffer from this problem, they are completely committed to memory. Applications with multiple segments/resources can vanish (virtual memory mapping fails). Have anybody idea ho to deal with this problem? Is some exception thrown by Windows which we can catch and handle? I searched MSDN/inet but doesn't find any relevant information.

So my idea is that your VMWARE<->disk connection could be interrupted for some time.
Jan Patera
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Post by Jan Patera »

Jan Rysavy wrote:So my idea is that your VMWARE<->disk connection could be interrupted for some time.
Robby, to verify whether Jan's idea is correct or not, could you please do the followig test? Just copy the folder with installed Salamander from the D: drive to the virtual VM's drive. Then suspend and restore the VM session. Does Salamander vanish as well as it would vanish if it was loaded from the laptop's drive?
Do other (larger, as Jan suggests) applications loaded from D: drive also vanish after restore?
Robby
Posts: 11
Joined: 18 Aug 2006, 10:41

Post by Robby »

Jan Rysavy wrote:My idea: when you start Salamander (or another application) from the network drive or USB drive and then broke network connection or remove USB stick, the running process just vanish. You can minimize application, broke connection, and restore it to reproduce this problem.
Hi, yes, this fits with my observation. What's really "strange" is, that the process just vanishes. IMO not the most elegant way to handle this by Windows.
Jan Rysavy wrote:It depends on PE (EXE/DLL) structure. Smaller applications doesn't suffer from this problem, they are completely committed to memory. Applications with multiple segments/resources can vanish (virtual memory mapping fails). Have anybody idea ho to deal with this problem? Is some exception thrown by Windows which we can catch and handle? I searched MSDN/inet but doesn't find any relevant information.
IIRC there should be way that your app doesn't get swapped out. Maybe it's sufficient to mark only some code segments that handle the connections to be kept in memory.
Jan Rysavy wrote:So my idea is that your VMWARE<->disk connection could be interrupted for some time.
It is, because I suspend the VM and than restore it. When restoring the the disk connection is interrupted for some time as it's a network connection that needs to get restored as well.
Robby
Posts: 11
Joined: 18 Aug 2006, 10:41

Post by Robby »

Jan Patera wrote:Robby, to verify whether Jan's idea is correct or not, could you please do the followig test? Just copy the folder with installed Salamander from the D: drive to the virtual VM's drive. Then suspend and restore the VM session. Does Salamander vanish as well as it would vanish if it was loaded from the laptop's drive?
Hi, no in this case it works.

I think there is a difference in VMWares suspend and Windows Standby. VMs approach is really just to stop everything and done. I expect Windows to close/restore some connections, disable drivers etc.
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