kernel headers

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Sat, 2013-01-12 at 07:26 -0500, Scott Robbins wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 05:09:41AM -0700, Lawrence Graves wrote:
> > what the error message says is that it could not find the kernel headers for
> > kernel 3.7.1-5. I know that they were installed. So where are the kernel header
> > file if in fact it was installed.
> 
> Usually, if VMware can't find kernel-headers, you need the kernel-devel
> package. 
> 
> The kernel-devel package number has to match the result of uname -r.  What
> I frequently see on the forums is that someone updated, got a newer package
> of kernel-devel, but hasn't rebooted, so there will be a version mismatch.  
> 
> Also, if running a PAE kernel, one has to specify kernel-PAE-devel.  (Which
> doesn't seem relevant in your case). 

Actually, in this case, the kernel-headers and kernel-devel packages are
installed. Further, this appears to only happen with the 3.7 series of
the kernel.

I know this because I was having the same problem and, because I need
VMware Workstation for my work (some things needed for my job require
Windows - arrgh!!!), I had to roll back to the 3.6 kernel. Currently, I
can confirm that VMware Workstation 9.0.1 is working with kernel version
3.6.11-3.fc18.x86_64 - and is working with that kernel unmodified (no
patches from VMware needed).

Now, I don't recall the exact error message with kernel 3.7 because I
reverted back to the 3.6 series (via yum distro-sync), but VMware
Workstation 9.0.1 clearly is having trouble finding the kernel headers
and other associated components with the 3.7 series of the kernel that
is in the updates-testing repository.

So, what that means is that something with respect to where the header
files are placed and located between these two series of kernels has
been changed to the point that applications like VMware Workstaion can
no longer find them. I would need to go back to the 3.7 series kernel to
get the exact error message. I may have it in an old VMware log file, so
I'll check that too next chance.

In my case, I'm running the 64-bit kernel, so there's no PAE stuff to
worry about.

I know that's not all of the information people are asking for, but
hopefully it does shed some additional light on the situation...

Cheers,

Chris

-- 
Christopher A. Williams <chriswfedora at cawllc.com>