In fact, the kernel driver is doing that already, but the problem is that the kernel driver and the X driver dispatcher don't fully agree about when the device is "too old". If they had done that, this problem would never had occured.

The permanent solution I'm thinking of is to remove the check for the "screen object 2" capability in vmwgfx/vmwgfx_driver.c in xf86-video-vmware. It seems too restrictive and the faulty VM I downloaded works just fine if I remove that test. That makes the dispatcher choose the modern KMS driver more or less whenever the kernel module is loaded, which is what we want.

/Thomas