VMware 4 now has networking support

[Wietse Venema]

Frustrated by the absence of recent VMware support I have taken a
day or so to tinker with Orlando Bassoto's port from a year ago at
http://www.break.net/orlando/freebsd.html.

I got the vmnet network interface to compile and run, but the rest
still needs lots of work.

Here are some first impressions after I got it to work on my FreeBSD
5.3 laptop computer (an IBM T42P). Normally I use this machine with
VMware 3.

    - An idle virtual machine running Win/XP or FreeBSD 6 burns
    10-20% of my 2GHz CPU. This may have to do with the next problem.

    - It complains that /dev/rtc is unavailable (no such file or
    directory) even when I union mount defvs over /compat/linux/dev.

    - When running as non-root, many things break with "NOT_IMPLEMENTED
    F(638):663" followed by "Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad
    file descriptor) on X server ...".

If someone wants to pick up this effort, great, because I am both
out of time and at the limits of my expertise.

You can find my tarball with patches and README for VMware 4.5.2 at
ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/pub/misc/vmware4-freebsd-20060218.tar.gz and
ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/pub/misc/vmware4-freebsd-20060218.tar.gz.sig

	Wietse