VMware Workstation and Player won’t compile on a Linux system, e.g., Fedora 29, running the new kernel 5.0.3. I dug around and figured out how to patch the VMware kernel modules and it appears to work. So far. The patch of hostif.c could be better but I wanted to get this published ASAP.
Update on 5/15/2019
Looks like VMware Workstation release 15.1.0 does not need these patches. I installed it and it’s working straight out the box. Or at least so far …..
Updates on 3/30/2019
- Kernel 5.0.4 is out and I don’t expect there to be a difference. I’ll test as soon as it’s available via dnf.
- VMware just released 15.0.4 and the patches appear to work for 15.0.4 as well.
- I’ve updated the vmware.15.0.3.kernel.5.0.3.sh script and renamed it to vmware.15.0.kernel.5.0.sh. It will stop if applying a patch fails and also handles running the script multiple times. The unpatched, original tar files are saved with “unpatched” appended and if these already exist are moved back to their original names.
Note: use at your own risk. Review the bash shell script so that you know what it’s doing.
There are two C source files that need to be fixed up:
- In vmmon, the file linux/hostif.c
- In vmnet, the file userif.c
Process
- “cd” to /tmp
- Download the three files you need as follows:
- wget https://www.allmanpc.com/vmware.15.0.kernel.5.0.sh
- wget https://www.allmanpc.com/hostif.c.diff
- wget https://www.allmanpc.com/userif.c.diff
- 3. Review the bash shell script. Be sure you’re OK with what it will do.
- 4. If you’re ready then execute “sudo bash vmware.15.0.kernel.5.0.sh”
As you can see at the end of the script you’ll either get the output of “systemctl status vmware” if the patch and build worked or a “failed” message if not.
Let me know if something doesn’t work.