Why is MATLAB crashing when run on a virtual machine?

I am attempting to run MATLAB on my virtual machine. When I do so, however, MATLAB crashes with references to "vm3dgl64.dll" in the stack trace, such as the snippets below:

[  2] 0x00007ffd5899e3fe C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2024a\bin\win64\libmwfl.dll+00058366

[  5] 0x00007ffd3fd2c5bf   C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2024a\bin\win64\jmi.dll+00705983

[  6] 0x00000000583a9ead C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2024a\sys\java\jre\win64\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll+02727597

[ 11] 0x00007ffe1da848ff                      C:\windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll+00674047

[ 14] 0x00007ffdca59696d                   C:\windows\SYSTEM32\vm3dgl64.dll+14903661

[ 39] 0x00007ffdea4411f0                   C:\windows\system32\opengl32.dll+00135664

I am using Windows Server on my VMWare virtual machine, and I am attempting to run MATLAB R2022b. What can I do to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This issue is likely caused by a VMware library that is being injected into MATLAB processes. The "vm3dgl64.dll" library that is mentioned in the crash log is VMware's graphics acceleration library. There are known issues with this specific VMware library, which have shown up in various instances of VMware tools:

Below are the steps to workaround this issue:

1. Determine your VMware Tools version from your graphics card. For example, VMware SVGA 3D Version 9.17.8.9 is part of VMware Tools 12.5.
2. Follow the workaround from the knowledge article associated with your VMware Tools version below:
   1. For VMware Tools 11.x, refer to the "Resolution" section of OpenGL dll is not unloaded on application exit.
   2. For VMware Tools 12.5, refer to the following steps obtained from Applications using VMware tools 12.5 is crashing:
      1. Click Start or Windows button (or press Windows key in the keyboard).
      2. In the Search box start typing "System Environment Variable".
      3. Click "Edit the system environment variable" from the search results.
      4. In the "System Properties" window "Advanced" tab, click "Environment Variables..." button at bottom right.
      5. Under "System variables" section, click on "New..." to create a new environment variable.
      6. Input "SVGA_ALLOW_LLVMPIPE" for "Variable name" and 0 for "Variable value", then click on "OK".
      7. Click "OK" to close the "Environment Variables..." window.
      8. Click "OK" to close the "System Properties" window.
3. If the previous steps do not resolve the issue, there is another workaround for MATLAB versions earlier than R2024a. Please use the "-noopengl" or "-softwareopenglmesa" flags when running MATLAB. For example, you could run the following commands in the Windows Command Prompt:

   matlab -noopengl plot(1:10); 
   matlab -softwareopenglmesa plot(1:10);