Hi Norbert!
Thanks a lot for your research!
After some research and alot more trial and error, I found that there
are multiple Issues:
1. the vmblock filesystem is never started
2. the file /usr/bin/vmware-user-suid-wrapper is missing the
apparently critical suid bit (I never knew about this bit before)
3. the vmtoolsd instances spawned by vmware-user-suid-wrapper dont
handle SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 as they should.
[...]
For Point 1 I attached a fixed etc/init.d/open-vm-tools. It has some
things commented out because of Point 3.
Actually I'm not sure if all of these changes should go into the init
script
of open-vm-tool - for running VMs in ESX and managing them via vcenter
- especially when they don't have a Desktop enabled at all - I'm not
sure
if one really wants to have all the drag&drop features and other fancy
stuff.
It might make more sense to put these things into an extra init script
in the open-vm-tools-desktop package, which should ship what you need
if you run a Debian installation with a full blown desktop, at least
in non-esx installations (vmware player, or however that thing was
called :))
Point 2 is easily fixed with chmod 04555
/usr/bin/vmware-user-suid-wrapper.
Makes sense. I'll add a dpkg-statoverride.
Point 3 is likely for upstream?
The issue here is that you cant stop/start the vmblock filesystem as
long as anyone is using it. Supposedly you would send a signal to
the
user daemons, telling them to give up any references to it - but its
not handled and instead the user daemon terminates.
And another bug would be that the vmxnet driver is not picked up
automatically, for this to work you would need to add the module to
the initital ramdisk. Along with other m0dules which should have the
same problem, but I cant verify it:
which version of open-vm-tools are you using now? There is a pre-inst
hook in the current version which should load vmxnet before loading
pcnet32.
I'd guess it should find its way into the initrd, too. But I don't have
any oldish vmware installations to give vmxnet a try. These days
vmxnet3
is being used, which is shipped with the upstream kernel and happily
put into the initrd by default as it is a used module.
vmw_pvscsi
Actually I've never seen that module in use bevore, I'll have to
investigate what I have to do to use it - I guess I have to pass a full
disk device into the VM. As it is shipped with the vanilla kernel I
would
not expect problems.
I'm thinking about organizing a bug squashing party here in salzburg
around the end of may - maybe you'd like to come so we can bring the
package into a useful shape together? I can handle the server/vm
parts, but I'm not really a desktop/gui user.
Thanks for your work,
Bernd
--
Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
http://bzed.de http://www.debian.org
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