Virtualisation choices on Linux are, as I’m sure you’re know, varied – even more so since VMware made its Workstation Pro software entirely free to download and use on Windows and Linux, even for commercial purposes, no license key needed.
This week, VMware Workstation Pro on Windows and Linux, and its macOS counterpart VMware Fusion, received an update with critical security fixes and a remedy to an issue affecting the (useful) Snapshots feature.
VMware Workstation Pro 17.6.4 patches four critical security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-41236, CVE-2025-41237, CVE-2025-41238, and CVE-2025-41239) and include a fix a fifth flaw filed under ‘moderate’ severity.
The critical issues all require(d) a “malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine”. If you’re reading this and panicking your whole system may be at risk because you keep a sly Windows VM around, relax: it’s unlikely you were.
But given that VMware products are heavily used across enterprise, businesses and cloud, any and all security vulnerabilities found and disclosed do require prompt resolution, which they’ve duly received.
This update also solves a snafu with the built-in snapshots feature in earlier builds, which was throwing a “vmx [msg.log.error.unrecoverable] VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vmx) vmx Exception 0xc0000005 (access violation) has occurred” error.
That issue? Now fixed. The cause? Convoluted, per VMware’s own description:
“During a VM power-off operation, if Ask me is selected in VM > Settings > Options > Snapshots, a specific pointer isn’t verified prior to back-end asynchronous function calls. As a result the pointer causes access violation, becomes invalid during the VM power-off procedure.“
The VMware Workstation Pro 17.6.4 release notes continue to mention ‘known issues’, including the ongoing broken network connections when installing Windows 11 in a virtual machine (switching the network adapter from NAT to Bridged is the workaround).
Multi-monitor features are not working correctly in certain situations, and hardware acceleration on Linux hosts with Intel Meteor Lake GPUs doesn’t work (adding mks.vk.gpuHeapSizeMB = "0" config value to the VM1 or global config file2 fixes it).
Download VMWare Workstation Pro Update
VMware Workstation Pro is powerful software that performs well on Linux systems – once it is up and running. The ‘bundle’ installer Broadcom provides often ‘fails’, reporting errors building core modules against new Linux kernels, requiring a workaround.
To get this update, login to the relevant page on the Broadcom portal to download an updated installer. Windows and macOS users may be able to update in app, although a while back that functionality was broken – so YMMV, as they say!