On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 07:52:11PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 09:45 +0000, Chris G wrote:
For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware. The Vmware recompile can be a bit difficult as Vmware is only guaranteed to build against certain kernel versions and you often have to use third-party patches to get it to compile with more recent kernels.
Erm if the kernel version is changing on automatic updates (i.e 2.6.x) then yum update is even more broken than I suspected.
Well when I ran a "yum update" it certainly updated the kernel. It leaves one previous version in the grub menu so you can select the previous version if the new one fails. I think I've seen about four kernel versions since I first installed Fedora 7 a couple of months ago.
If I do "yum list updates kernel" now it says:-
kernel.x86_64 2.6.23.1-10.fc7 updates
Since I'm at 2.6.22.9091.fc7 at the moment that looks like an update to me.
If the kernel version isn't changing and it is just the same kernel version with security fixes applied then I can honestly say that since running VMware from version < 1.0 I have never ever had that problem. The VMware modules have always built again for me when a new kernel package has been released.
Ubuntu and Debian will not increment the kernel version unless you explicitly allow it with dist-upgrade (AFAIK)
Also given that you are an a paid product, if you do have problems with new kernels on a distribution then generally an email to VMware support will be meet with a kind thank you for telling them if they don't already know and generally in my experience a patch for you to try within 24 hours. Even when I had old versions of Workstation on 64bit machines before Workstation supported AMD64 these patches were always forthcoming and any feedback I had gratefully received.
If you do a search for "vmware workstation 6 kernel 2.6.22" on Google you will get a *lot* of hits and it seems that there most definitely isn't an official Vmware patch. In fact I'm sure I found somewhere a pointer to the third-party patch for 2.6.22 actually from the Vmware site saying something like "try this if you like, it might work" (fortunately it does!).
Generally however I find that applying the latest updates from VMware to your product will have it working on any stock distro kernel. I have never needed to resort to these 3rd party patches you speak of
It'll work with the kernel that distribution X starts with but Vmware don't seem to attempt to keep up with kernels as they happen.