Michal Kubecek
93cbadb262
Workstation/Player 15.5.0 tries to guess the right retpoline (Spectre) related compiler command line options, resulting in objtool warnings like warning: objtool: .text.__x86_indirect_thunk_rbp+0x0: unsupported intra-function call warning: objtool: If this is a retpoline, please patch it in with alternatives and annotate e.g. in vmmon-only/common/memtrack.o (but also many others). This seems wrong; out-of-tree modules should be built with the same compiler options that were used to build the kernel they are built against. Distribution kernel devel packages usually make sure this is the way so let them do their job.
This repository tracks patches needed to build VMware (Player and
Workstation) host modules against recent kernels. As it focuses on recent
kernels (older ones do not need patching), only vmmon and vmnet modules are
currently handled as the rest has been upstreamed for some time.
Main branch master handles only "infrastructure" files which do not belong
to VMware module sources. Two other branches, "player" and "workstation"
track upstream module sources distributed with Player and Workstation,
respectively. Tags of the form "p${version}" (e.g. "p12.5.5") and
"w${version}" correspond to clean unpacked sources of modules from
a particular version of Player or Workstation.
From these tags, branches "player-${version}" and "workstation-${version}"
are forked. These branches track changes needed to build these modules
against recent kernel versions. Tag "p${ver}-k${kver}" marks the set of
changes needed to build modules from Player ${ver} against kernel ${kver},
e.g. p12.5.5-k4.11 is for Player 12.5.5 and kernel 4.11; similar naming
scheme "w${ver}-k${kver}" is used for Workstation modules. In general,
later points in the branch should also work with older kernels (e.g.
p12.5.5-k4.11 with kernel 4.10) but it's not guaranteed; it may happen that
a fix for new kernel version may be too complicated to make also work with
older versions.
At the moment, changes are tested to build against all (vanilla) kernel
releases starting with 4.9.
This repository is provided "as is" with no guarantees. Use the contents on
your own risk.