Mageia forum

A machine I support is configured with Mageia 4 running VMware Workstation 11.0 and two Windows 7 guests within Workstation.

The normal usage of this machine is to run those Win7 guests; the owner can barely spell linux. This configuration exists to support easy recovery when Windows gets hosed.

Both guests run Outlook 2013. Both guests crash the host when Outlook 2013 undergoes an automatic update. This apparently is a known problem with VMware Workstation and Outlook 2013. The particulars of the crash are that apparently a bug in the linux ext4 filesystem gets tickled...at least, the kernel panic message (when one appears) says that this is where the crash occurred.

My question, if anyone knows: does the upgrade to mga5 (with its much later kernel) deal with this issue?

There has been no Mageia bug reported during the mga5 development neither for vmware nor outlook, even less for the combination of those two.
If you have a upstream bug reference I can ask our kernel maintainer if the fix is in already.

But in any case if the upgrade doesn't help you could simply migrate to a new system with btrfs or similar

Well, I know that VMware is aware of the problem, because they have a knowledge base article describing possible workarounds (which have been partly but only partly effective in my situation). I think it is their problem, not a Linux problem. It certainly is not a Mageia problem. Well...almost certainly; I don't think it is and see no reason why it would be.

I am also aware that there has been a bug posted a few different times for the particular crash I see here (starting back in the 2.6.20-something series), and evidently fixing it is a serious problem for some reason.

However, virtualization code is built into the kernel and is continually being changed - and VMware is one of the participants in that process. So I have hopes that this problem will abruptly vanish with some update. Just wondering if this one is it.

I thought about converting to btrfs, but I don't know if that filesystem is fully mature yet, and I hesitate to open a new can of worms with this particular machine.

VMware Workstation 10.0.6 and Mageia 5 with kernel 3.19.8 will NOT work out of the box.
Look here:
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16184

why not try XFS, thats been around for years.

redhat is making it default from redhat 7 onwards instead of ext4

regards peter