New Plymouth does not render in VMware framebuffer

[Aaron McSorley <a@aaronmcsorley.com>]

    The Wheezy version of Plymouth (0.8.5.1-5) renders themes without
issue on the VMware framebuffer but, on the new version with Jessie
(0.9.0-9) plymouthd seems to crash when the ramdisk scripts try to run
the daemon.  I've tried to get some useful debug by adding --debug to
plymouth and plymouthd in the ramdisk, as well as plymouth:debug on
the kernel line but, it's not very helpful.  The only way I could find
to confirm this, was to manually replace the plymouth binaries and
libraries in the initramfs with the old ones from Wheezy.  So, using
the same kernel, and only replacing the plymouth binaries and
libraries in the ramdisk that was generated in Jessie it renders
properly.  The new version renders on the real hardware I've tested it
on but, I'd really like to be able to test my plymouth theme in a VM.
Does anyone know what might have changed between these version that
would break compatibility with VMware?