open-vm-tools for Fedora
Daniel P. Berrange
berrange at redhat.com
Wed Oct 15 13:53:44 UTC 2008
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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