F10, VMware Server 2.0, and selinux

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 11:39 -0500, Claude Jones wrote:
> On Sunday 14 December 2008 11:07:53 Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 09:47 -0500, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > > Hash: SHA1
> > >
> > > Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> > > > I'm just curious - Has anyone made any progress on figuring out why
> > > > VMware Server 2.0 does NOT run on F10 unless selinux is disabled? Even
> > > > running selinux in permissive mode causes VMware Server fits.
> > > >
> > > > This has been this way at least since VMware Server 1.x running on F8.
> > > > I know because I can recall having to fully disable selinux on my
> > > > VMware Server systems for at least that long.
> > > >
> > > > It never seems to have been fixed to this day, and that's a long time
> > > > for such an issue to exist. Is anyone working to resolve it?
> > > >
> > > > Cheers,
> > > >
> > > > Chris
> >
> > VMWare's SELinux problem is caused by their shady RPM's and have nothing
> > to do with F9/F10.
> > Officially, VMWare only supports RHEL 4.x and 5.x. Fedora is not
> > supported and their SELinux support (built into their RPMs) was designed
> > to support RHEL.
> >
> > In short, unless RHEL starts supporting distributions beyond EPEL and
> > SLES, there's nothing to be done in the Fedora side of things.
> >
> > - Gilboa
> 
> I happen to have VMWare Server 1.07 running at this very moment. Is this a Ver 
> 2 problem? 
> -- 

To be honest, AFAIR VMWare Server 1.0.x, beyond being EOL, doesn't
support kernels >= 2.6.26 - even with the latest any-to-any patch.
Though, AFAIK, it didn't have SELinux problem under both F8 and F9.
On the other side VMWare Server 2.x hass replaced the GTK console
application with a super-complex web-client which, coupled with VMWare's
known tendency to release half-broken RPMs, makes it an SELinux accident
waiting to happen...

Either way, given the nature of VMWare Server (closed source,
proprietary RPM's, out-of-tree kernel drivers) - there's nothing Fedora
can (or should) do about it.

On the up side, if you have semi-new hardware (w/ Intel VT or AMD SVN),
qemu-kvm is a very good OSS alternative. (I recently migrated all my
VMWare Server 1.0.x VM's to qemu-kvm [manually - I have yet to use
virt-manager] and I'm very happy with it)

- Gilboa