Comment 12 for bug 598542

Note that it's not impossible for Ubuntu to pull the newer upstream release of open-vm-tools without Debian doing so first, it's just not how packages typically get maintained. If the upstream version solved the bug, I'd have no qualms pulling it in in advance of Debian.

I'd prefer to wait for the upstream project to comment on the bug before I go applying patches myself, as doing so makes me a bit uncomfortable. In particular, the struct netdev_hw_addr you use appears to have been introduced in 2.6.31 (and it looks like netdev_for_each_mc_addr was introduced later), so this patch would break compatibility with older kernels.

Since open-vm-tools appear to currently work all the way back to 2.6.9, I suspect the upstream project won't want to break compatibility that sharply. You might be able to short-circuit a code review round-trip with upstream by adjusting the patch to conditionalize based on what features are available on the current kernel (which surely open-vm-tools already does, I just don't know how)

If upstream turns out to be slow to respond, I'd consider applying the patch independently. That being said, packages do get backported, and people do run userspaces against older kernels, so I'd be less apprehensive about applying the patch without seeing it incorporated into upstream if it were updated to work on all previously supported kernel versions.

In any case, thanks for your work on this. I'll try to keep an eye on the upstream bug report as well as Debian