Mandatory VMCI.SYS - Cure worse than the disease?

[kasper]

The Windows 10 February updates include the vmci.sys driver which up to this point was controlled by

the Workstation Tools install.   Now it is mandatory?   I never used this in VMWare tools because of security

issues.    Now it is part of the Microsoft patch Tuesday updates.   Can someone explain why this has changed?

[wila]

Hi,

Your choice to do so, but beware that it is a non standard configuration and as such it is less tested. VMCI provides a high speed connection to the VM, so it is preferred to use sometimes.

VMCI is used for a variety of things.

See: https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/search?p=1&q=vmci if you want to get an idea. No, that's not the windows version of vmware tools, but this is the port that we can look at some implementation details.

Some of that code says "it is assumed that VMCI works".. and that doesn't surprise me at all as it is a default configuration.

edit:

Merged another thread from Kasper into this one.
Not quite convinced if that helped making things easier to follow.

--
Wil