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IDProjectCategoryView StatusDate SubmittedLast Update
0009441Kali LinuxKali Package Bugpublic2025-12-15 08:322025-12-16 13:54
Reporterhissox Assigned To 
PrioritynormalSeverityminorReproducibilityhave not tried
Status newResolutionopen 
Summary0009441: VMware auto resizing breaks due to missing xserver-xorg-video-vmware
Description

The package xserver-xorg-video-vmware was removed on 11.11.2025: https://pkg.kali.org/pkg/xserver-xorg-video-vmware.

This breaks automatic resizing for netinstaller-based VMs under VMware.
With the package came two files:

  • /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vmware_drv.so (SHA256: 0127c09c686af1504047b59d5e67dac053b6cdde6bf749d82c3e7b5bbcfc9a9b)
  • /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxatracker.so.2 (symlink to 2.5.0) (SHA256: 604b003fc6df50f785d3d48de58be7726e30276408518b00a93ba458acdcca64)

They are responsible for the automatic resizing of the KaliVM in VMware. Since the package is missing, these two files can no longer be installed and automatic resizing fails.

I have posted more details here: https://forums.kali.org/t/vmware-auto-resizing-breaks-due-to-missing-xserver-xorg-video-vmware/14961/1

Please consider keeping this package in the repository.

Activities

arnaudr

arnaudr

2025-12-16 02:32

manager   ~0021025

The package xserver-xorg-video-vmware was automatically removed from Debian testing due to two bugs.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1116332 is likely a false positive.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1112670 is more serious however. The latest version of xserver-xorg-video-vmware (version 13.4.0-2) seems to have issues, since it was rebuilt against latest version of mesa, and it removed support for XA (X acceleration) library. There's a report upstream at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-vmware/-/issues/12. Quoting a vmware dev:

The driver is basically useless without XA and unlikely to work well, if at all.

There's nothing we can do in Kali at this point.
hissox

hissox

2025-12-16 10:46

reporter   ~0021032

Thank you for following up on this.
Looks like we can indeed just wait at this point. I will also make sure to try 2025.4 with Wayland sometime..
arnaudr

arnaudr

2025-12-16 13:54

manager   ~0021033

You get Wayland out of the box if you choose GNOME or KDE for the desktop environment (if you install Kali via the installer).

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2025-12-15 08:32 hissox New Issue
2025-12-16 02:32 arnaudr Note Added: 0021025
2025-12-16 10:46 hissox Note Added: 0021032
2025-12-16 13:54 arnaudr Note Added: 0021033