As there is almost always a need to apply the most recent patchset to releases of VMware vmmon/vmnet to support the latest kernels, it might be useful to document a process for making this (relatively..) easy:

VMMON and VMNET are picked up during the vmware-modconfig… command, from /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source, and this process expects to find vmmon.tar and vmnet.tar there..

So.. go to the the site for the latest patchset (currently https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules/tree/tmp/workstation-17.0.2-k6.5) and select ‘Code‘ / ‘Download ZIP‘.
Then unzip this, which gives you a folder containing the sub-folders vmmon-only and vmware-only.
cd to this, and create basic TAR files from these sub-folders:
# tar -cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only
# tar -cvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only
If you need to, save the ‘old’ tar files (as root..):
# mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmmon.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmmon.tar.orig
# mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar.orig
Copy the new/patched versions:
# cp *.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/

After that, each time you run # vmware-modconfig –console –install-all after updating the kernel, this will automatically compile/install the patched versions..

As usual, there are many ways of doing this, but this is one I have used for some time now..

Robert Gadsdon. September 2nd 2023.