Kernel – 4.17-rc3 Released – Still OK with Latest NVIDIA and VMware..
Kernel 4.17-rc3 is out, and brief details of changes from -rc2 are here: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1804.3/05507.html
Tested with NVIDIA 396.18 and VMware 14.1.1 (vmmon and vmnet), and all still compile OK..
Robert Gadsdon. April 29, 2018.
For the record, while both vmmon and vmnet build cleanly (except for ever growing list of warnings) and work fine (AFAICS) with recent kernels up to 4.17-rc3, there is one problem. The vmmon module has an indirect call written in inline assembler which won’t be protected by a retpoline even if built against a retpoline enabled kernel with supporting compiler. So if your kernel has retpolines enabled (to mitigate Spectre v2 vulnerability) you should consider patching that.
Thanks for pointing that out.. I’ll mention that in a new article, as it is important..
RG.