open-vm-tools for Fedora

[Jon Ciesla]

> 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]

Wow.  Certainly gives one pause.

> Daniel
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