kernel 6.3.4 may break vmware player

[jgetsoian]

Using VMware player on Fedora Linux. Linux update to kernel 6.3.4 enables a security feature know as "Indirect Branch Tracking" which may prevent the vmware.servce daemon from loading and thus break networking on any vm's. 

Workaround is to add  "ibt=off" to the linux boot command line. VMware needs to update their drivers.......

[Technogeezer]

I assume you're running an Intel Core 11th gen "Tiger Lake" or later CPU, as IBT is dependent on instructions on that architecture.

What version of Player are you using (and I also assume that you're using @mkubecek's patches to get the VMware modules to compile).

[jgetsoian]

Player is 17.0.2. Have used the patched modules regularly in the past but interestingly enough have not had to for Player 17, whose modules compiled out of the box for me. All I add is that after compiling I have to re-sign the drivers for each new kernel for Secure Boot. And yes, both machines where Player was stopped by IBT are 12th gen.

The code maintainer at Fedora Bugzilla stated that Fedora had decided they had waited as long as they were willing to before turing IBT on by default. As it happens, IBT has also tripped up Fedora VBox users.

[CherryA27]

This appears to have also tripped up my VMWare; I probably should have looked here before anywhere else when troubleshooting, but oh well.

Is there any known fix or workaround to this?

[trust2fight]

Same for Kali Linux

6.3.0-kali1-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.3.7-1kali1 (2023-06-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux