vmware[23] ports status for 5.3?

[George Hartzell]

I'm curious about the state of the vmware ports for the 5.3 Release.

VMWARE2

    I've been successfully running vmware2 on my 4.x box for several
    years, in a bridged configuration with Windows98 running in a
    virtual disk.
    
    I managed to get vmware2 mostly running in a T42p running 5.3BETA3
    this morning, using patches from the ports/68202 pr, replacing
    various calls to kmem_alloc_pageable with kmem_alloc_nofault, and
    sacrificing tuxedo-wearing fowl to the appropriate daemon.
    
    I built it for host-only networking, since I'm tired of worrying
    about having the windows machine out on the net and I'm planning
    to just give it nat access out to the world.

    My virtual machine boots and runs, but I have a trivial problem
    and two unsurmounted problems.

      1) when I start the virtual machine, it complains about a "CPUID
	 feature bit not understood by this version of the product".
	 I've told it not to bother me about it any more, and just
	 kept going.  Am I courting disaster?

      2) I can't seem to get networking to work.  I've assigned
	 192.168.254.[23] addresses to the two tcp/ip devices that
	 show up in the control panel, but I can't ping my host (which
	 does have a vmnet1 interface on 192.168.254.1).  Suggestions
	 would be welcome, though I haven't thrown in the towel yet.

      3) The machine takes about 2 minutes to shut down.  It puts up
	 the shutdown screen, the load goes to 1, and nothing
	 happens.  I decided to ignore it, and sure enough it
	 eventually finished.  Thoughts?

VMWARE3

    I actually got a vmware3 license back in the day, but haven't ever
    put it to use.  I thought about moving "up" to vmware3 on the new
    laptop, but I noticed a comment about needed to turn off acpi.
    Since I need acpi to make my laptop work well, I'm stuck.

    Is there something inherent in the vmware3 port that means that
    it'll never get along w/ ACPI?  Is someone moving forward with it?
    Is it a project looking for an owner?

VMWARE4

    Anyone playing with vmware4?

g.