prelink breaks VMware 4.5.2 on FC2?

[Keith G. Robertson-Turner]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004 23:03:59 +0100, D. D. Brierton wrote:

> SUCCESS!

>  Although remember it was Keith who did all the hard work.

Gosh :)

Really, that's too much credit.

Software that is installed in a proprietary fashion (i.e. without deb/rpm
etc) isn't that difficult to trace once you understand the basics of the
FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).

It is then simply a case of locating the binaries and excluding them from
being prelinked.

As an update to the previous script, I've found a relatively easy way to
determine (without guesswork) the location of the vmware libraries ...
using the vmware wrapper itself! Here's the final script:

###
### save this to plbl-vmware.sh
### then
### sh plbl-vmware.sh 
### Check for valid output - i.e no errors, then
### su -
### sh plbl-vmware.sh >>/etc/prelink.conf
###
export	vmpath=`which vmware | xargs dirname` &&\
	echo "#VMWare blacklist" &&\
	cat $vmpath/vmware |\
	sed -e "s/exec \"\$binary\" \"\$\@\"/echo \"\$binary\"/g" >/tmp/find-vmlibs &&\
	sh /tmp/find-vmlibs |\
	sed -e "s/\/bin\/vmware//g" |\
	sed -e "s/^/-b /g" &&\
	rm -f /tmp/find-vmlibs &&\
	file $vmpath/vm{net*,ware*} |\
	grep ELF |\
	sed -e "s/:.*//g" |\
	sed -e "s/^/-b /g"
exit 0
###

> I'll be appending this fix to my support ticket at VMware.com and
> hopefully they might include a post-install script to the next RPM to
> make sure the above is present.

Great, but that's only a workaround, not a fix. They need to investigate
what is broken in their software that causes prelinking to break it. This
is a fairly common problem with proprietary software.

-
K.