VMware To Mac Users: OS Upgrade Issues With ATI Cards

VMware Fusion is a virtualization software that allows Windows applications to be run on Intel-based Macintosh PCs.

Apple released its Mac OS X 10.5.7 upgrade on Tuesday.

VMware's Team Fusion technical team on Wednesday posted on its message board a warning that all Mac systems, including the Mac Pro and iMac, with an ATI graphics card on which Windows games or other Windows 3-D applications are run, should not be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.7.

"We are making this recommendation because the ATI driver in Mac OS X 10.5.7 breaks the 3-D acceleration feature in VMware Fusion. You will likely see issues ranging from slow performance, to incorrect rendering, and even crashes, when you run your 3-D applications in a Windows virtual machine on Mac OS X 10.5.7," Team Fusion warned.

Team Fusion said that Apple and ATI are both aware of the problem and are working to correct it.

Team Fusion's finding and responses can be viewed in this forum on the VMware Web site.

In response to questions posted at that forum, VMware said that for users who have already upgraded their systems, there is no easy way to uninstall the upgrade. "The best place to check is of course Apple. But I think you would have to reinstall 10.5 and then apply the 10.5.6 combo update (and please back up your data before doing any of these)," wrote David Liu of Team Fusion.

When several posters on the forum complained that VMware should have caught the problem earlier and/or given earlier warning about the problem, Pat Lee, director of personal desktop products at VMware, apologized and said that VMware found the problem during its prerelease testing of Mac OS X 10.5.7, and has since been working with ATI and Apple to resolve it.

"We really wanted to see it fixed before Mac OS X 10.5.7 was released, but unfortunately it was not resolved for Mac OS X 10.5.7," Lee wrote. "We are still working closely with ATI and Apple to resolve the problem and work with them so they release their necessary update as soon as possible."

VMware has a good track record of releasing software with few problems.

In the worst recorded episode of a VMware bug, the company last August said that its VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 shut down virtual servers as a result of forgetting to remove a built-in timer in the beta versions of the software that disabled the betas after a certain period of time.

As a result of that bug, Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, issued an apology to its customers.