VMware failing on /dev/vmmon - can this be permanently fixed

General Discussion
1

Suddently VMware VMs would not start with message popping up that vmmon was not found.
In my understanding this is one of VMware network modules assembled when VMware was installed. Apparently in result of Clear Linux self update it is no longer there.
What is the fix and what is the way to prevent this from happening?
Thanks and Regards…

2

Further looking into this problem it appears that whenever VMware starts to fail with such message it points to VMware CL kernel modules being ignored by CL and each time it needs to be fixed with re-building:

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

After which VMware resumes working.
Since this failure seems to recur after each automatic update of Clear Linux, necessitating the above fix, is there a solution to make VMware work reliably under Clear Linux?
Thanks in advance for any insight…

3

This is a general frustration with any out-of-tree modules since they between them and the Linux kernel are always detached in some sense. The ideal solution is for kernel modules to be upstreamed into the Linux kernel but it isn’t always possible.

You can install the LTS kernel on Clear Linux OS to lessen the frequency it happens.

Some module vendors distribute dkms.conf files which lets you easily use DKMS to automatically rebuild the kernel module against kernel updates. You can try doing this yourself but it would be outside of the vmware-modconfig tool.

4

Thanks very much for this insight into the cause of this issue and possible workarounds.
I am leaning towards either LTS kernel or just keep fixing the way I have done so far.
Thanks and Regards. Greatly appreciate your reply.

5

Everyone faced the same problem. From my notes :

Check vmware version!

Now we need to fix kernel modules , just follow the steps

cd ~/Downloads && wget https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules/archive/workstation-15.5.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf workstation-15.5.6.tar.gz && cd vmware-host-modules-workstation-15.5.6/
tar -cf vmmon.tar vmmon-only && tar -cf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
sudo cp -v vmmon.tar vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
6

Thanks for additional info. I will add this to my notes.