Disable 5-level paging

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1

I have a new Dell PowerEdge R750xs, AlmaLinux 9.2. I installed VMware Workstation 17 Pro, VMware-Workstation-Full-e.x.p-22060606.x86_64.bundle.
All VM’s fail with “VMware workstation cannot run on hosts with 5-level paging enabled.”

I can only find instructions to disable 5-level paging for OS versions less than 9. Apparently the grub boot kernelopts is hidden somewhere in 9. I understand I should be able to add “no5lvl” somewhere, but again that’s for OS version 8.

Does this option exist in 9? As a rookie, I would need step-by-step instructions to effect the changes

Thanks.

2

Option exists according to kernel-doc:

$ grep -A1 no5lvl /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-5.14.0-284.18.1/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
	no5lvl		[X86-64] Disable 5-level paging mode. Forces
			kernel to use 4-level paging instead.

Grubby can abstract away differences, e.g.

grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args=no5lvl

See Chapter 4. Configuring kernel command-line parameters Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | Red Hat Customer Portal for more information.

1 Like
3

Thank you! Very clear and concise, and worked perfectly. The pointer to the documentation was very welcome.