Error "context mismatch in svga_sampler_view_destroy" running GUI programs on Ubuntu in a VM

Question

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 on a VMware workstation player VM on windows 10. When I run some GUI programs (have observed this on Spyder and Chromium) am getting the message "context mismatch in svga_sampler_view_destroy" is repeatedly printed to the console.

It seems to be related to virtualization as it goes away if turn off 3D display acceleration. I don't want to turn off acceleration as it makes a big difference to the video performance.

Crimpy

Answer 1

I got the same error while running the Android Emulator in VmWare player 14.0. This seems to be an issue with Ubuntu, VmWare and OpenGL 3.3

What solved my problem was the solution from Mesa on how to handle Ubuntu as guest OS in VmWare

In short you need to set the environment variable SVGA_VGPU10 to 0 (this turns off OpenGL 3.3 support, falling back to 2.1)

To set it for one session of Bash, use:

$ export SVGA_VGPU10=0

To permanently write it to the Bash user settings:

$ echo "export SVGA_VGPU10=0" >> ~/.bashrc

Azaleah

I'm VmWare player 14.0 on ubuntu 17.10 and that didn't solve it for me. – Cytogenesis

@Cytogenesis Not stated in the original answer, but this is related to Ubuntu 16.04. I would regardless suggest that you should go with the LTS versions. – Azaleah

Answer 2

For future reference the solution is to disable Accelerate 3D Graphics

Cesaro