Initialising VMware Player 14 on Fedora 28: Unable to compile Virtual Machine Monitor

Question

As I was installing VMware Player 14 in Fedora 28, I wasn't able to compile the vmmon module for executing VMware. The vmnet was successfully compiled but for the vmmon it occur the following errors:

/tmp/modconfig-rBg8Xn/vmmon-only/linux/hostif.c: In function ‘HostIF_InitUptime’:
/tmp/modconfig-rBg8Xn/vmmon-only/linux/hostif.c:1779:4: error: implicit
declaration of function ‘init_timer’; did you mean ‘init_timers’? 
[-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
init_timer(&uptimeState.timer);
^~~~~~~~~~
init_timers
/tmp/modconfig-rBg8Xn/vmmon-only/linux/hostif.c:1780:31: error: assignment
to ‘void (*)(struct timer_list *)’ from incompatible pointer type ‘void 
(*)(long unsigned int)’ [-Werror=incompatible-pointer-types]
uptimeState.timer.function = HostIFUptimeResyncMono;
                           ^

The command I ran was:

sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

Also, all the kernel modules are installed correctly according to the command:

 sudo dnf install gcc glibc-headers kernel-devel kernel-headers patch

How can I fix this? Have I downloaded the wrong modules?

Answer 1

This issue occurs because of a recent breaking change in the Linux Kernel. The issue has been reported, for example, here

Kernel 4.15-rc1 has been released, and brief details are here: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.3/00971.html

With VMware 14.0.0 – plus the 4.14 vmmon patch – vmmon breaks again [...]

The possible solution is to apply the patch located here for VMWare.