Trying the most basic 'vanilla hello world' kernel driver, install using insmod, and trying in module_init to do a simple kmalloc() fails, kmalloc returns NULL - i.e. cannot allocate memory. The driver loads fine under another non-VM system. Is this a CentOS/VMware quirk ? Does anyone know of a workaround or is it just a fact of life that you cannot use insmod once the system is running ? After all, the 'normal' kernel modules are able to load OK at startup. Thanks, MikeW