[CentOS] Re: CentOS 5.2 VMI support

Fri Jul 11 09:58:59 UTC 2008
John <jknappers-argentia at hotmail.com>

Hello,

"nate" <centos at linuxpowered.net> schreef in bericht 
news:4582.65.102.144.193.1215733640.squirrel at webmail.linuxpowered.net...
Ruslan Sivak wrote:
> I'm using VMWare Server 2 RC1 to on top of CentOS 5.2 x86_64 running a
> CentOS 5.2 i386 guest.  I have enabled VMI in VMware, so I guess it
> won't let me install if VMI wasn't available in the kernel?  How do I
> know whether VMI is supported/enabled and what performance benefits can
> I expect from it?  I'm still not getting full hard drive speeds (only
> getting about 1/3 when using hdparm -t ).

I don't believe it is supported in CentOS 5.x.  I am using Fedora Core
8 for VMI support.

[root at dc1-ntp001:~]# dmesg  | grep -i vmi
VMI: Found VMware, Inc. Hypervisor OPROM, API version 3.0, ROM version 1.0
vmi: registering clock event vmi-timer. mult=7809995 shift=22
Booting paravirtualized kernel on vmi
vmi: registering clock source khz=1862048
Time: vmi-timer clocksource has been installed.

I suspect it will be in RHEL/CentOS 6.x

nate

Indeed, It's not in the EL5 kernel, but I hope that Redhat backport the VMI 
3.0 patch for Update 3.
It Can be done, SuSE did it with SLES10 SP2 and kernel 2.6.16.

Maybe some one with enough kernel knowledge can try to integrate the Novell 
/ SuSE patches in EL5 2.6.18 kernel.
SLES 10 src.rpm kernels are available at 
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/SLES10_SP2_BRANCH/
Eventually it maybe an addition for the plus repo.

But, I'm afraid that I don't have the knowledge to pull this off ....:(

The easiest way to get VMI support, is to rebuild the latest FC7 (2.6.23.xx) 
kernel, It compiles and installs correctly on CentOS5.2. It will complain 
about a to old mkinitrd, but with an forced install, it will create a 
correct initrd.  The later FC8 needs also and updated / backported new 
mkinitrd, and updated Vmware-tools. The Vmware tools included with ESX3.5 
update 1 won't compile on kernel 2.6.25. This is an known issue. Rumours go 
that the Vmware-tools in latest Server packages are 2.6.25 compatible, but I 
haven't tested that

I tested rebuild FC7 kernel with an test VM in ESX 3.5. It runs OK.

John
.