Bounty and timeline on vmware 5.x on FreeBSD 6.x

[Per Hedeland]

Christian Laursen <xi at borderworlds.dk> wrote:
>
>"Rick C. Petty" <rick-freebsd at kiwi-computer.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 01:44:01PM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
>>>         libglibmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>         libglibmm_generate_extra_defs-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>         libatkmm-1.6.so.1 => not found
>>>         libpangomm-1.4.so.1 => not found
>>>         libgdkmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>         libgtkmm-2.4.so.1 => not found
>>>         libgnomecanvasmm-2.6.so.1 => not found
>>>         libsexymm.so.1 => not found
>>
>> I suspect most of these come from their GNOME C++ counterparts, such as
>> glibmm, gtkmm, gnomemm, libgnomecanvasmm, libsexymm, et al.  Not sure if
>> this would work but you could try installing the freebsd ports for these
>> and adding some /etc/libmap.conf entries??
>
>That will not work. Linux binaries need linux libraries, so the right thing
>to do would be to make linux-* ports of the neccesary linux libraries.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from trying, but unless things have
changed drastically from vmware 3/4, the hard part of getting it to work
on FreeBSD isn't finding Linux libraries for the binary, nor even
fiddling with the Linuxolator to provide additional support for it (if
that is even needed), but to port the Linux versions of the vmmon and
(assuming you want networking) vmnet kernel modules.

Source for these used to be, and probably still is, available in the
vmware distribution, but it's a significant amount of work for someone
with good kernel knowledge, and the requirements seem to be more or less
different for each combination of vmware version and FreeBSD version
(i.e. you need to produce vmware-version-specific ports with lots of
FreeBSD #ifdefs). The diffs for vmware-3-vmmon are over 7000 lines.

Orlando had "almost finished" the vmmon port for vmware 4, but there
were still some problems left (e.g. it couldn't run on SMP FreeBSD
IIRC), and he hadn't even started on vmnet (I believe that's the simpler
of the two though, you basically replace it completely with an interface
to if_tap which has/had most of the functionality needed). I had vmware
4 running briefly with his preliminary vmmon port, but without
networking it was useless to me.

Note that this isn't optional optimization stuff like kqemu, vmware will
not run without vmmon, and will not have networking without vmnet.
Again, this is the case with vmware 3/4, I haven't even looked at
current versions.

--Per Hedeland