Symptom: vmhgfs excounters null pointer exception and stack dump during startup.
Technical breakdown:
In VMwareTools 8.8.1, vmhgfs-only/filesystem.c, HgfsReadSuper calls compat_d_alloc_name(NULL, "/").
However, since commit
a4464dbc0ca6a3ab8e9d1206bc05059dae2a559d
(Ref: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.commits.head/307754), d_alloc_name does not accept NULL parent.
Per Red Hat Bugzilla advice (Ref: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=755788), see if vmhgfs maintainer agree to rewrite this part to create the rootDentry.
Affected Guest system:
kernel-3.1.1-2.fc16
kernel-2.6.41.1-1.fc15
Spent some time to follow the logic and refine the codes.
This works for my kernel-3.1.6-1 (FC16) and kernel-2.6.41.4-1 (FC15).
Now, the mount point /mnt/hgfs is up.
diff vmhgfs-only-528969/file.c vmhgfs-only-siukoon/file.c