I am writing this blog entry as a note to myself, to keep track of this issue and, more importantly, the solution I found.

Problem Statement:

When running VMWare Player or Workstation on a Linux host, with multiple processors (or cores), on a 64 bits kernel, VMWare Player and Workstation keep crashing with error

vcpu-0:ASSERT vmcore/vmm/main/irq.c:100 bugNr=2293

Root Cause:

After some Googling and searching VMWare’s Knowledge Base, I found this article referring to an issue with Non Maskable Interrupts (NMI) in Linux Kernels 2.4 and later.

It appears that Suse and RedHat Linux have this setting enabled by default, as shown by

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
 1

Workaround:

Disable NMI watchdog.

At runtime, by typing (as root)

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog

At boot time, by modifying Grub configuration by adding

nmi_watchdog=0

to the

kernel

line in

/boot/grub/grub.conf

and reboot

Interesting side note : this also solves my problem of running these VMWare create virtual machines under VirtualBox

Enjoy !