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Gazebo 9 can't run on VMWare without downgrading to OpenGL 2.1 or turning off 3D Acceleration

When launching Gazebo v9 (latest of v9) on VMWare with 3D Acceleration I get the following error message:

VMware: vmw_ioctl_command error Invalid argument.

I have looked around for a solution here and on VMWare forum and all suggested solutions hint at turning off 3D acceleration or downgrading to OpenGL 2.1 via exporting SVGA_VGPU10=0 before running gazebo:

http://answers.gazebosim.org/question/13214/virtual-machine-not-launching-gazebo/

https://answers.gazebosim.org/question/16002/hello-every-time-i-start-gazebo-8-from-kinetic-ros-it-show-me-vmware-vmw_ioctl_command-error-invalid-argument/

There also seem to be an open ticket on this:
https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issues/1950/vmware-throwing-an-error-when-launching
Which unfortunately also hints at downgrading to OpenGL 2.1 as a workaround.

While this maybe a solution for many, it doesn't help for my use case. I need to use Gazebo under VMWare with 3D acceleration turned on and without having to downgrade to OpenGL 2.1. The reason is I rely on some of the feature set provided by OpenGL 3.0.

I would like to know if this a VMWare problem (other 3d software seem to run fine) or a Gazebo issue? Is there a real solution? Or is it being addressed?

I am running: VMWare Fusion 11.5 / Ubuntu 18 VM / Gazebo 9. VM configuration: 4 cores / 8 GB system memory / 2GB gpu memory

Asked by Samahu on 2020-04-16 11:11:55 UTC

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I have exactly the same issue and tried the following but the problem of freezing still remains:

My system Win10 system is:

  • VMware 16 player installed on win 10
  • VM running Ubuntu 20.04. LTE RAM of
  • 32GB RAM
  • Nvidia 1080 GTX

I have tested the following:

  1. Uninstalling gazebo 11 and installing version 9
  2. Setting SVGA_VGPU10=0
  3. Changing the memory of the WMware display from 8GB to 128MB (like it is in virualbox)
  4. Turning 3D acceleration off (which makes gazebo extremly slow)

All the above steps did not fix the problem. When I try to run gazebo in DropBox I have no issues. How is this possible? What can I do to get gazebo working without any issues in VMware?

Asked by mike on 2021-03-05 18:39:29 UTC

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