VMWare kernel module build fails
 

Have an LFS 4.0 system. Downloaded VMWare from their website... installed fine. However when it tries to build its kernel modules the build is successful, but when loaded into the kernel it fails due to unresolved symbols.

Am I missing something? Does something need to be built into my kernel that isn't perhaps? Is anyone familiar with what the VMWare modules depend upon? I emailed the folks who sell vmware but they haven't emailed me back yet. its been a week the bastards.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance,
jpbarto

P.S. the kernel is 2.4.21-rc1

Which vmware version are you using? I'm using vmware a whole lot here, been bitten by that kernel problem ore than once too.

sorry about that... its the downloadable VMWare Workstation 4 eval version.

I'm still on old-school vmware 3.something so what I have to say may not be entirely accurate for the 4.x version.

First of all, when vmware's installation asks you to compile a kernel module, it will get the kernel headers from /lib/modules/<version>/build/

Then make sure /boot/System.map is up-to-date as well. It must be the same file that was generate during your last compile. So make sure that /lib/modules/<version>/build/System.map and /boot/System.map are identical. If not, cp the file from build/ to /boot.

It can also be caused when you compile a kernel but never installed it (ie: copied from arch/i386/boot/bzImage to /boot and then reboot the computer to load that new kernel).

So, make sure the running kernel matches the files in /lib/modules/<version>/build/ and likewise with System.map.

I think those unresolved symbols are generated by the depmod program. I think vmware's install program might be running depmod after it copies the kernel module to /lib/modules/<version>/ but I'm not entirely sure.

Either way, when you run depmod you should not get unresolved symbols at all, so you can use depmod to test to make sure your setup is working properly.

I'll give it a shot when I get home thank you.

lfslinux: the kernel source matches that running (I just rebuilt it the other night to include acpi support). The only thing that didn't match up was the system.map... so I copied that over and reran the vmware-confg.pl.

it still finds unresolved symbols in the vmmon module. the unresolved symbols are as follows:
symbol kunmap_high
symbol highmem_start_page
symbol kmap_high

is there a module / kernel feature I'm missing?

When you run depmod do you see the same unresolved symbols?

I cd to vmware-distrib/lib/modules/source and untar the vmmon.tar. I cd to vmmon-only and type make. the build goes fine and I'm left with a module vmmon-up-2.4.21-rc1 in a driver-2.4.21-rc1 directory. I cp the new module over to /lib/2.4.21-rc1/kernel/drivers and type 'depmod'. I'm told that the new module has unresolved symbols. I type 'modprobe vmmon-up-2.4.21-rc1' and I am told that kunmap_high, highmem_start_page, and kmap_high are all unresolved symbols.

any ideas?

looks like it may be an issue with the highmem support my kernel has for my gig of ram. hmmm... I could turn it off and still use 900 MB of my ram.

It appears that many other modules have had trouble in the past with highmem calls... haven't found any for 2.4.21 specifically though... any suggestion on how to fix it?