Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:55:23 -0600 From: "Josh Paetzel" <jpaetzel@FreeBSD.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: open-vm-tools in base Message-ID: <46480be7-b1a1-4da8-97ea-c4b97b0b997c@www.fastmail.com>
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I've socialized putting emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11 in base to a small group of developers and gotten positive feedback, so I'm widening the audience. Proposal: Put emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11 in the base system of FreeBSD This port contains kernel modules and a binary to ease running FreeBSD as a VM in a VMware virtualized environment. VMware supports this port by directly maintaining the code for it, however they do not include the FreeBSD version of the tools in the hypervisors anymore. (You can't just click "install guest tools" from the VMware management interface) Because these kernel modules are out of tree they are broken with some regularity by changes to HEAD. By putting a version of them in tree changes to HEAD that broke the drivers and kernel modules would be more obvious to developers. I have never heard of a drawback or reason why you wouldn't want to run these tools. The main reason I see them not installed is due to people not knowing about them or forgetting to install them, or running VMs in environments where installing 3rd party software that needs an internet link is problematic. I'd continue to proxy changes back upstream as I've been doing for some time now. There is some precedent for this. Driver(s?) that were once a part of the tools have been moved to base already. The VMXNET3 driver is an example of this. Also, the RC scripts that load the tools and start the userland daemons run a VMware included binary to check if the platform is supported by the tools, and just don't start them if it's an unsupported platform, so there's no danger to just trying to start them blindly across the default installs. Since emulators/open-vm-tools (the master port to emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11) depends on X11 and is not a candidate to include in the base system, I'd like to keep the ability to install the package/port for both open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-nox11 and let the user select which one is started. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel
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