Hi. I am on a different distro right now but am thinking to switch to Tumbleweed. Question about that… When a new kernel comes out, I always need to patch/fiddle some things to make Workstation work again (vmmon and vmnet).
My question is: does Tumbleweed takes care about this? In any way? So to say, if a new kernel arrives, I understand I need to recompile these two modules. Thats okay. But makes Tumbleweed my life easy, because it delivers the patches thats needed to recompile vmmon and vmnet? That I just need to recompile, and not having to search the internet for patches?
VMware (Broadcom) is responsible for their kernel modules - and yes, you do have to rebuild the modules each time, and yes, you will have to find the patches that work for the kernel that you are using.
That said, there are some developers who have modified the VMware drivers to run with more recent kernels (this isn’t just for openSUSE distributions, but for any distribution with a newer kernel), because Broadcom sometimes is a bit slow in keeping pace with kernel changes.
This is the “price” of using free proprietary software. You have other virtualization options available where this isn’t necessary, such as VirtualBox and KVM, which generally do not have these issues (KVM in particular, since it’s part of the kernel itself).
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