Kang the Conqueror Conquers VMWare’s Shitty Kernel Integration

To the innumerable readers (you cannot be numbered because you probably don’t exist) who have wondered where I went, I apologize.  Life has been very hectic, so I gave up on the blogging.  I will try to pick up again where I left off.  Now back on topic.

As some of you might have guessed, I do not like running Windows XP Professional on my office workstation like the rest of the IT drones.  I need to be different, quenching my unbridled need for attention and an unconquerable desire to appear more technically savvy than my co-workers.  I nonetheless need to use Windows (the university I work for is most obviously a Microsoft shop, like the rest of them).   I had converted a dual boot machine into a dual boot machine that can mount a physical NTFS partition as a VM (a big thanks to Imran Nazar for his instructions here).  That was interesting, but I realized the workstation I use has SATA drives on a RAID set to legacy mode. Imran’s instructions (and that of VMWare) recommend people doing this only with IDE drives for reasons above my technical knowledge.  This led me to VirtualBox for a while.  If I remember, you could use a couple workarounds, but I did not want to invest the effort in reading VMWare’s lengthy documentation on the topic.

I had a good go with VirtualBox.  Sadly, I did not use OSE (the Open Source Edition).  I really needed the command line tools to convert the rawdisk (the NTFS partition) into the correct image file.  Obviously, those tools, arguably the only real gem in the VirtualBox toolkit, were only in the proprietary version.  The problem was that the performance was, how can you say, piss poor.  I did not want to expend the effort to figure out why this was exactly.  I tried increasing the memory, including the video memory, but I could not speed up the Windows GUI rendering.  Every time I opened a menu, it was painfully slow.  I actually saw it render from nothing, to a greyish shadow, to a premonition of a Start Menu.  Finally, the Start Menu would manifest itself 30 seconds after I wanted it.  So, I decided if I was going to be using a proprietary blob, it best be VMWare.  At least they had sufficient performance.  Also, VirtualBox had really annoying disk permission and user privilege issues that required constant tinkering as I moved things around often in this testing phase.  I know there solution was more Unix-like, but it constantly annoyed me.  I am sorry VirtualBox, but I will try tinkering with you again when I have time.

So, I nuked the physical partition (nothing of value had been installed on it yet) and opted for a classic VM for easy backup (translation: copying and pasting the directory) and to have more space.  I played with VMWare Workstation, but I was sick of being reminded of the impending time bomb that would reign hell fire upon me after a month.  Then, like a good piece of shitty trialware, it would demand I pay my dues (at the time of this writing, 189.00 USD).  I am not inclined to pay that much for software I need just to run more software I hate, so I looked for something I could use that was better than VMWare Player.  I want to be able to create VM’s after all.  Then, it came to me.  I totally forgot about the free VMWare Server 2 product.

I quickly realized why I had forgot it.  It is a huge pain in the ass.  I had accidentally downloaded the second version, which is a plague of locusts on the virtualization community.  I know it is a free product, and it is only meant to encourage those interested in VMWare to upgrade to their more serious ESXi product, but a web interface!?  You want to advertise your products as a platform for concurrently running operating systems in realtime, and you actually think someone can control that with a shitty web interface?  I am not a real developer by any stretch, VMWare, but you have to be kidding me.  Needless to say, I downgraded to VMWare Server 1.0.7 (if I remember correctly).  Fortunately, I was receiving some really annoying compiler errors after installing the RPM and running vmware-config.pl.  All hope was lost.  Or was it?

Kang released a patch that adjusted all the calls VMWare kernel module was making to deprecated features.  Sadly, VMWare kernel developers are not in touch with the one thing they need to know, the Linux kernel.  Once I applied the patch, the VMWare kernel module compiled perfect.  I then downloaded and compiled the console addition, and voila.  Another exciting end to an exciting day.

Kang, I do not know you well (or even at all), but you are my hero.