vmhgfs module not built

[Armin Kunaschik]

Ubuntu version 16.04
open-vm-tools-dkms 10.0.7

open-vm-tools-dkms 10.0.7 builds only vmxnet.ko but no vmhgfs.ko

dkms.conf in /usr/src/open-vm-tools-10.0.7 looks incomplete (no vmhgfs entries at all) compared to the one in open-vm-tools-dkms-9.10.3 from Ubuntu 15.10.
When I copy the old dkms.conf from the old 9.10.3 package, dkms process doesn't work anymore:

dpkg-reconfigure open-vm-tools-dkms
Removing old open-vm-tools-10.0.7 DKMS files...
Loading new open-vm-tools-10.0.7 DKMS files...
Error! DKMS tree already contains: open-vm-tools-10.0.7
You cannot add the same module/version combo more than once.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: open-vm-tools-dkms 2:10.0.7-3227872-2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-16.32-generic 4.4.6
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-16-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Apr 19 17:40:10 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-02-04 (2266 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: open-vm-tools
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-03-29 (20 days ago)

[Robert C Jennings (rcj)]

This is expected behavior, the host guest filesystem (HGFS) is handled in usespace by FUSE rather than in the kernel.

From [open-vm-tools-announce] open-vm-tools 10.0.0 release [1] and in the changelog:

New features in open-vm-tools 10.0.0 include:
- Shared Folders: For Linux distributions with kernel version 4.0.0 and higher, there is a new FUSE based Shared Folders client which is used as a replacement for the kernel mode client.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/open-vm-tools/mailman/message/34424776/

[Armin Kunaschik (armin-kunaschik)]

Thanks for pointing out. I was not aware of this.
The fuse-client is still barely undocumented. After some amount of Googling I leave a few links here for documentation purposes,
just in case other people stumble about this topic too:

Best documentation I found:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware/Installing_Arch_as_a_guest#Shared_Folders_with_vmhgfs-fuse_utility

Usage of fuse in /etc/fstab (comment #4)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1551558

Quick 'n dirty howto
http://grumpyapache.blogspot.de/2015/11/vmware-shared-folders-oin-fedora-23.html

[Jamie Lokier (jamie-shareable)]

The vmhgfs-fuse client is too buggy to use for some things, such as running Git,
as reported (by me) at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1579544

Even if that's fixed, the vmhgfs-fuse client has different behaviour with file permissions and creating files on the host, compared with the vmhgfs kernel module.

So until vmhgfs-fuse supports most of the functionality and fairly reliably, it would still be useful to be able to use the vmhgfs kernel module.

[Jamie Lokier (jamie-shareable)]

The project maintainers are welcome to declare vmhgfs unsupported, but until they do I think the current situation is a regression in functionality. vmhgfs-fuse just isn't a functional replacement yet.

(Background: I am using VMWare Fusion 8.0 on a Mac. I had a working system which has broke on upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 due to vmhgfs going away, and unfortunately after trying a number of methods I still haven't found a solution to replace it. NFS and CIFS to the host have not worked out, and Samba client is currently broken. I am rather desparately now trying a patched vmhgfs-fuse, but having vmhgfs kernel module available would be more welcome.)

[Robert C Jennings (rcj)]

@jamie-shareable VMWare developers have indicated[1] that the kernel driver should not be used with 4.0 and newer kernels. I am going to close this bug as won't fix for the kernel compilation issue. The vmhgfs-fuse issues will be addressed in bug #1579544

[1] https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/issues/82#issuecomment-214510903

[raven322 (spike85051)]

well this needs to be fixed and its not ubu specific. its DEBIAN specific, above stretch. you hit this error when upgrading too.

I keep getting systemctl errors on boot because the module just isnt there. neither for open-vm-tools nor fuse.

[raven322 (spike85051)]

at least help remove the error?