I am using MacBookPro’s since the last 6-7 years or so.  The last one I acquired is the Late 2008 model.  This machine suffered from day #1 of a serious display issue : the upper part of the screen flickers under some load / heat condition.

Problem has been reported numerous times to Apple and the discussion about this issue on Apple’s Support Community forum contains more than 1500 messages posted and close to 190.000 views !

Yesterday, Apple quietly release an EFI firmware patch to address this issue.  Yes, you read it right, Apple did release a firmware patch for a 4 years old machine.  This is so unusual in (consumer) IT industry to mention.

I applied the patch yesterday after having spent an hour or so reading comments from early adopters and I have the pleasure to work on my machine since then without any single screen flickering.

Thank you Apple to take care of old customers, old machines and continue to improve your products.

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 !