VMWare Workstation 8.0.3 and Linux Kernel 3.4 Patch

Linux Kernel 3.4 has been released by Linus Torvald yesterday and i have built the latest Linux Kernel on my machines and tested that VMWare Workstation 8.0.3 (and pressumably VMWare Player too) worked well with the latest Linux Kernel + patches.

First off, remove your old VMWare installation by removing all files under these directories:
/etc/vmware*
/usr/lib/vmware*

Next, start your VMWare installation using --ignore-errors parameter like this:
./VMware-Workstation-Full-8.0.3-703057.i386.bundle --ignore-errors

After that, you download the patch that you can fetch on my SlackHacks repository. Give execute permission to the bash script and start it using
./patch-modules_3.4.0.sh

It will patch and recompile all VMWare modules and in the end, it should work again :)

If you encountered any errors, please read the whole post, starting from the top just to make sure you started with a clean installation of VMWare. Also, give detailed specs if you wanted to report any problems with this patch.

Credit goes to the author of this patch, not to me.

Suhosin Patch for PHP 5.4

For those who care about Security in PHP must know about Suhosin, made by Stefan Esser (aka i0n1c). It's an advanced protection system for PHP installations which provides better protection by adding patches that never pulled by the PHP developers into their main code. I have been using this project for some time to add protection on my server that i manage.

Ever since PHP released 5.4, the patch is no longer compatible due to some big changes in PHP 5.4, such as the removal of magic quotes and many other features that prone to securities. In one side, this is good news, but in other side, the patch that Suhosin provide is not available for PHP 5.4.

Stefan has said that he's working on Suhosin to be compatible with PHP 5.4, but that would take some time to complete. In fact, he mentioned that it would be completed around April. Let's hope his schedule is not slip.

VMWare Workstation 8 and Linux Kernel 3.2

I have just completed compiling Linux Kernel 3.2, the latest release of Linux Kernel which was released early this month. Like always, new major release brings a lot of improvements which can be seen in KernelNewbies.

For those who would like to compile Linux Kernel 3.2, please pay attention when it comes to ethernet drivers. You must make sure that you have written down your ethernet card vendor as the configuration will ask you again and if you failed to answer (by typing no or picking the wrong vendor), you will end up with no ethernet driver loaded and if you are connected to the Internet using a wire, then you are out of connection. Luckily it can be solved by just recompiling the kernel and load the new module.

New kernel means new patch for VMWare and i have confirmed that a patch from Weltal's Blog is working like charm. All you need is to apply the patch included and it should go just fine. Please change the version according to the VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player version installed on your machine.

In case you find this error:

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_AdjustMappings’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:180:4: error: implicit declaration of
function ‘iommu_found’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_RegisterDevice’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:415:7: error: too few arguments to 
function ‘iommu_domain_alloc’
include/linux/iommu.h:68:29: note: declared here

Then, you can fix this problem by :

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar -xvf vmmon.tar
cd vmmon-only/linux/
vi iommu.c

add this in top part of the file

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(3, 2, 0)
#include <linux/pci.h>
#define iommu_found() iommu_present(&pci_bus_type)
#define iommu_domain_alloc() iommu_domain_alloc(&pci_bus_type)
#endif

then finish it by saving it and then:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/
rm vmmon.tar
tar -cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

That's it. You can start your VMWare and voila... it's working again.

Another Linux Improvement Patches Attempt

There's always room for improvement. I think that quotes also apply to Linux Kernel development. Every new kernel release always tries to bring new features, but behind all those new features, there's always an attempt to improve performance.

Several weeks ago, Phoronix wrote an interesting article about 200 lines of code which could improve desktop performance by automatically creating task groups per TTY. While this patch set has done a great job, another attempt has been made to further improve it.

This month, Andrea has updated his patch set against 2.6.37-rc1 and based on benchmarking done by Phoronix using Phoronix Test Suite, it does give an improvement compared to other kernels used on the test process. So, what's the idea behind this patch set?

Taken from Phoronix's article:

The Transparent Hugepage Support in the Linux kernel works by reducing the number of TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) entries that such applications need and at the same time increasing the cap that a TLB cache can provide.

For more information about THS, please have a look on article by LWN and also documentation in the Kernel.

I think this will be released in 2.6.37 or probably in 2.6.38 if it's too late for 2.6.37. I'm looking forward to see more improvements in the future

Renewing Windows

I don't know how long have i abandon my Windows system on my desktop since i used Linux all the time, but today i rebooted to Windows and it seems that i missed so many security patches from Microsoft and also many of my applications were considered outdated. So i decided to upgrade all of them and it does take some time.

I finally finished all of the updates and now, my system has been renewed . I guess it won't take long before i switched back to Slackware again

Microsoft Security Updates

Today Microsoft released 11 patches, with 6 of them are marked as critical, while the rest are marked important. The affected application are Microsoft Office and Windows (with lots of components inside it). Go get the list of updates here.

Oh yeah, it's only for Windows user. Linux users? Don't waste your time downloading this updates