Patch for Vmware 12.1.1 Kernel 4.9

Note: User at your own risk !

Vmware 12.1 modules compilation is broke since kernel 4.9. Here’s a quick and dirty patch I came up with after failing to find a solution.

Usage

1. Go to vmware modules source directory

    cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
   

2. Extract vmmon and vmnet sources

    tar xf vmnet.tar
    tar xf vmmon.tar
   

3. In the same directory, move the patch files from this repo

    cp <path_to_this_repo>/vmmon-hostif.c/hostif.patch .
    cp <path_to_this_repo>/vmnet-user.c/userif.patch .
   

4. Apply patches

    patch -s -p0 < hostif.patch
    patch -s -p0 < userif.patch
   

5. Recreate archives

    tar -cf vmmon.tar vmmon-only
    tar -cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
   

6. Recompile sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

Resources

Commits responsible for this error:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/9beae1ea89305a9667ceaab6d0bf46a045ad71e7 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1e9877902dc7e11d2be038371c6fbf2dfcd469d7#diff-e37c5ffd9b4db050c3f7eae7d74e64c3R1230

Ths signature of get_user_pages_remote changed, instead of passing (write=1,force=0) they are passed in a flag ( 0 |= FOLL_WRITE or 0)