I’m trying to use WMWare Worksatation Pro on Fedora 44. I have a script to properly build and the VMWare kernel modules with DKMS, including signing the modules with MOK. The vmmon and vmnet modules seem to be loaded properly, but I get a kernel panic anytime I try to start a VM on kernels 7.1.7-200.fc44.x86_64 and 7.1.8-200.fc44.x86_64. For reference, VMWare workstation works fine on a Kubuntu system running kernel version 7.0.0-29-generic.
Before anyone asks why I’m using VMWare instead of Virtualbox or virt-manager, SANS clases use VMWare VMs.
The way VMware works, it’s known often not to work with the latest kernels. Back when I used it I always hunted some forums for the latest patches to get it to work on Fedora. They were provided by some VMware folks on their free time.
If none are available, then getting on older Fedora kernel is the only option.
Outdated information. The latest version of VMware Workstation (26H1) doesn’t need patches to compile and load modules under Fedora kernels up to 7.1.7. Older versions did (pre 17.6). Now that’s not saying that there’s not an incompatibility with their drivers (because we all know how the Linux kernel interfaces can change at the whim of the developers), but I’ve personally run Workstation 26H1 on F44/kernel 7.1.7 on a system with integrated Intel graphics and not had any issues with kernel panics. So something else is going on here and it could be configuration related.
It would be interesting to see what is causing the kernel panic.
Just a note that VMware Workstation 26H1 has switched its rendering from OpenGL to Vulkan. I wouldn’t rule out any GPU driver/Vulkan/Mesa issue that’s triggered by VMware (we’ve all seen lots of issues reported with GPU drivers here).