Knowledge Base

Starting with VMware Workstation 3.1, VMware Workstation contains a new implementation for its virtual serial ports that does not support the TTY type of serial port, which actually uses pseudo-TTY objects on a Linux system. You may be running a virtual machine with a TTY type of serial port created with an older version of VMware Workstation.

Pseudo-TTY objects are no longer supported in VMware Workstation because of their asymmetrical nature (the master end has the semantics of a pipe, whereas the slave end has the semantics of a TTY), which is not suitable for communication between two virtual machines.

However, if you want to use pseudo-TTY, you need to modify the configuration file for the virtual machine to use the older serial port implementation. Open the configuration file (.vmx on Windows hosts, .cfg on Linux hosts) in a text editor and add the following line:

serial.v2=False

If you decide to use the older serial port implementation in your virtual machine, this affects all serial ports in the virtual machine. You cannot use the pipe type for a virtual serial port (which actually uses Unix socket objects on a Linux system) in the virtual machine and the virtual serial port will not perform as well as it does under the new implementation.

To revert back to the new implementation, remove the line you added to the configuration file.