Monday, July 6, 2009

VMware Server and Fedora Core 11, Part 3

I ended up recompiling the kernel by following the directions here step-by-step:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel

I applied the kernel patch that was included in: vmware-update-2.6.29-5.5.9-3.tar.bz2 and built new RPM packages.

However, when I went to install the new kernel, I ended up getting an error about a failed dependency on kernel-firmware.

I found this post: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206844&highlight=kernel+rpm+failed+dependencies

and made the changes described to kernel.spec


%define with_firmware %{?_with_firmware: 1} %{?!_with_firmware: 0}
-----------to look like this-------------------
%define with_firmware %{?_with_firmware: 0} %{?!_with_firmware: 1}



%define with_firmware %{?_without_firmware: 0} %{?!_without_firmware: 1}
-----------to look like this-------------------
%define with_firmware %{?_without_firmware: 1} %{?!_without_firmware: 0}


And then re-recompiled the kernel.

This time, there was a kernel-firmware.*.rpm in my ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64 (here is a directory listing):

kernel-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-debug-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-debug-debuginfo-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-debug-devel-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-debuginfo-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-debuginfo-common-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-devel-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-firmware-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm
kernel-headers-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm

I ran the following command:

rpm -ivh kernel-firmware-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm kernel-headers-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm kernel-devel-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm kernel-2.6.29.5-191.pjt20090702.fc11.x86_64.rpm

And was able to get my custom kernel installed.

From here, I just followed the steps in my first post for getting through vmware-config.pl successfully (vmmon and vmnet compiled and all that good stuff).

Successful execution of VMware Server 1.0.9 and able to start up existing VMs.
Posted by at 11:44 PM
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2 comments:

  1. Hi Phillip:

    Your post has been of an incredible help to me, however I've been testing my VMServer intents into a 32bit cpu and at the very last step ( when everything seems to work fine ) I'm still unable to run VMs due to an error of "vmmon modules version mismatch, expering 138.0 and got 137.0". Maybe my kernel version ( 2.6.29-6-217 ) won't work with your described steps ?

    Do you have any recommendation ? Is very frustrating to achieve all the steps and have this "minus" error at the very end!!

    Thanks,
    Mitchel Alioscha
    ReplyDelete
  2. Mitchel,

    I built against a 2.6.29.5-191 version ... it looks like you have a slightly more current kernel than me.

    As you know, with VMWare on Linux, the kernel version makes all the difference in the world. Even a minor kernel upgrade can break VMWare Server.

    In fact, after I got VMWare to work, I made sure I would never accidentally upgrade the kernel (added an exclude on kernel* to my yum.conf)

    I wish I could help more, but I've never ran across an issue with vmmon module version mismatch. If you've compiled vmmon and vmnet against your latest kernel, then it *should* match fine.

    The only thing I could recommend is taking your exact error message and posting on the VMWare Communities. People are pretty responsive there.

    I really do sympathize with your frustration, and hope you're able to get it working!

    Thanks,

    Philip
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