I recently upgraded to Fedora 15, and Workstation 8.0.1 seems to have a couple of pretty major bugs on this host. (If I recall correctly, this also happened with 8.0.)
The one that makes it almost unusable is that it seems to interfere with all I/O on the system. For example, if I have Workstation running with a Windows 7 guest, just stitting idle, and then I try to write a large file on the host, the copy command uses 100% CPU, as does Workstation, and sometimes other processes like firefox. The copy takes ages. I tried writing a 1GB file on the host, and with Workstation running it took 49 seconds, and used 100% CPU, whereas with the VM suspended, it took 2 seconds.
Note that this occurs even when only 1 processor and core are allocated, and with 3-D acceleration turned off (because this is also broken on Fedora 15). I have tried this with both a Windows 7 guest and a Fedora 14 guest, so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the particular guest. The applications using 100% CPU seem to be unresponsive sometimes, suggesting they are spinning waiting for some kernel lock so they can do I/O or something.
I would really like to get this resolved as it can make the system almost unusable at times, with everything just freezing over and over when I/O is happening, so help in sorting it out would be greatly appreciated. It's pretty much a show-stopper for me.
System info:
Running kernel 2.6.41-9-fc15.x86_64
Hardware is 6-core Intel i970 with 12GB RAM
The Windows 7 guest was allocated 4GB RAM, the Fedora 14 guest was allocated 512MB
Thanks in advance