open-vm-tools for Fedora

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 03:38:05PM +0200, Denis Leroy wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> >... and rather than helping to propagate the notion to vendors that out
> >of tree drivers are "okay", why not try to help work with the
> >maintainers to get the drivers upstream?
> 
> My understanding is that they are. One of problem with the "get the 
> drivers upstream" concept is that it's a slow and difficult endeavour. 
> There used to be some anti-VMWare resentment on LKML that wouldn't help 
> either, but I don't know whether that's still true or not...

Some of the it has been sent upstream and there were some issues
that needed more work - eg getting a reliable and safe way to
detect that it is running on vmware

[quote http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/8/130]
vmware could have used one of the following methods to communicate to 
the guest kernel:

 - a CPUID and an MSR range - like a good virtual CPU should. That way 
   even bootloaders could detect the presence of vmware.
 - or a PCI ID and a PCI driver like KVM does
 - or a system call hypercall gateway like Xen and KVM does
 - or it could even have used a DMI signature of some sort

but no, vmware had to use 30 year old unsafe ISA port magic...

To add insult to injury that port is named 'backdoor' - very smart and 
confidence raising naming. Plus it does not even use some well-known PC 
port that is harmless to read - it has to be from the middle of the 
generic IO port resource range where a real PCI card could sit: 0x5658.
[/quote]

Daniel
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