VMware Workstation Pro 16 — https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro.html

VMware Workstation/Player 16.2/Player 16.2.4 and Linux kernels 5.18

2 min readJun 19, 2022

Note: use at your own risk. Review the bash shell script so that you know what it’s doing.

VMware 16.2 to 16.2.3

As of June 17th, 2022, VMware Workstation 16.2 kernel modules fail to build when running Linux kernel 5.18. I have 15.18.5 currently. It’s probably similar for later 5.18 kernels. When you update your system and get the latest 5.18 kernel, your VMware becomes unusable. I put together the patch files and a bash shell script to fix up the kernel module C source code. Until VMware fixes 16.<whatever version> to work with kernels 5.18.<whatever> and greater, we need to apply these patches for every VMware version 16 update.

There are three C source files that need to be fixed up. You can see the list at the top of the bash script. The patches turned out to be trivial.

In vmmon, the file linux/hostif.c
In vmnet, the files userif.c and bridge.c

Process

“cd” to /tmp
Download the four files:

3. Review the bash shell script. Be sure you’re OK with what it will do.

4. If you’re ready then execute “sudo bash vmware.16.2.kernel.5.18.sh”

As you can see at the end of the script you’ll either get the output of “systemctl status vmware” if the patch and build worked or a “failed” message if not.

Let me know if something doesn’t work.

VMWare Player 16.2.4

VMware Player 16.2.4 requires some additional patches. I developed/tested this using kernel 5.18.13. Follow the process above, but for step 2, download a tar file instead of getting each file. The tar file contents unpack into the user’s current working directory (which should be /tmp from step 1 above).

Tar file URL: https://www.allmanpc.com/site_files/vmware/vmware.16.2.4.kernel.5.18/vmware.16.2.4.kernel.5.18.tar

VMware Workstation/Player 16.2/Player 16.2.4 and Linux kernels 5.18

VMware 16.2 to 16.2.3

Process

VMWare Player 16.2.4

Written by Mark Allman