Hi all--

If anyone has already solved this, the solution is pretty well hidden from the all-seeing GooglEye (or my Google-Fu is weak) - but as I discovered last night after upgrading my OpenFiler kernel, parts of VMware Tools for vSphere (some of the important parts, like vmxnet and vmxnet3) don't build on guests using linux kernel version >= 2.6.29. (Latest OF kernel version is 2.6.29.5.something-or-other.)

Here is a patchset that I put together last night that resolves the problem (which is due to changes in a couple of struct members that were introduced somewhere between 2.6.26 and 2.6.29). Don't apply this if you're not running 2.6.29+ guests - it may or may not cause problems with pre-2.6.26 kernels. Although I tried not to do anything which I thought would break backwards-compatibility, I am not a kernel expert. I know with certainty that it works on 2.6.29 and probably will work on anything newer.

Also, there are no magical patching scripts here - you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way - untar a couple of files, apply the patch, and then tar them back up before you run your install.

If this has already been done by somebody else, well, then move along, nothing to see here. If not, the download URL and SHA1 signature appear below.

http://www.deadbunny.com/vmware-tools-2.6.29-patches.tgz
921ea122da7897e7a1062b44a0fb30e9def358e3