Welcome to my world

Oh another Kernel update another VMWare problem, great. When you upgrade to 2.6.19, you get the following error
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only/userif.c: In function ‘VNetCopyDatagramToUser’:
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only/userif.c:629: error: ‘CHECKSUM_HW’ undeclared (first use in this function)
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only/userif.c:629: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only/userif.c:629: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only/userif.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.19-1.2895.fc6-i686'
make: *** [vmnet.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config2/vmnet-only'
Unable to build the vmnet module.
After a bit of hunting on LWN, I found that CHECKSUM_HW has been remove from 2.6.19 and replaced with CHECKSUM_PARTIAL. Fortunately, Robin Kearney at usefulthings.org.uk has provided a patch.

It’s a little more complicated than the usual fixes, at the patched files are within a tarball, but you should be able to cut and paste from below.

As root:

cd /tmp
wget http://usefulthings.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/vmnet-only-2.6.19.patch
cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
cp vmnet.tar vmnet.tar.orig
tar xf vmnet.tar
patch -p0 < /tmp/vmnet-only-2.6.19.patch
tar cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
vmware-config.pl -d


You might remember I had a bit of a nightmare getting vmware to work on a dual core Intel. In the end it turned out that Fedora had chosen the wrong kernel arch (i586 rather than i686). This morning I was having a poke around the FC6 Common bug list (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common) and found the problem. Apparently it’s bug in Anaconda, the Fedora installer. Here’s what they say:

Anaconda installing the wrong architecture kernel in some systems. cpuspeed is not working for the same reason. This does not affect out of box functionality much but if you are compiling third party kernel drivers you might run into this on x86 architecture. x86_64 and PPC systems are not affected. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=211941. You can bypass this bug in a new installation by specifying “linux i686″ in the installation boot prompt.

An updates.img is available for this issue http://people.redhat.com/pnasrat/211941-updates.img. Please follow the instructions here: Anaconda/Updates.

To check which kernel package architectures are currently installed:

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n"|grep kernel|sortIf the installed kernel architecture is i586, but your machine is i686 capable (Pentium II or K6II or higher), use the following simple workaround:

1. Install yumdownloader. yumdownloader is part of yum-utils in Fedora Extras. You can also manually download the kernel.su -c "yum install yum-utils"
2. Get the current i686 kernel:yumdownloader kernel.i686
3. If the version of the kernel downloaded is larger than currently installed:su -c "rpm -ivh kernel-2*.i686.rpm"
• Alternatively, if the version of the kernel downloaded is the same as that currently installed:su -c "rpm -ivh --replacefiles --replacepkgs kernel-2*.i686.rpm"
4. Restart the machine.reboot

I’ve used VMware on Fedora since it because free. It’s great, No more rebooting to switch between Windows and Linux to use one application that just won’t work with WINE. Since upgrading to FC6, I have a problem running vmware-config.pl. Each time I ran it, I’d get error about config.h not being found. The simple (dirty) way to fix this is to do this:

touch /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m`/include/linux/config.h

You should now be able to re-run vmware-config.pl without a problem.

Remember that you’ll need to do this each time you update the kernel.

Update I had a nightmare of a time getting this to work on a dual core Intel. It seems the Duos use i586 rather than i686. To fix you need to install the correct kernel devel version wget ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/fedora.redhat.com/updates/6/i386/kernel-devel-`uname -r`.i586.rpm
rpm -Uvh kernel-devel*.rpm then link to the correct linux.htouch /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-i586/include/linux/config.h

Update 2 I think I’ve found the cause of the above weirdness. Read More