This bug has been entered into bugzilla as a "tracker" bug, to be used to close duplicate bug reports against that are reported by people using VMware and similar types of software with Red Hat Linux. While we hope that Red Hat Linux works with VMware, and other such software, we do not officially support Red Hat Linux running inside a VMware virtual machine, Virtual PC, User Mode Linux, or any other emulated or simulated environment, open or closed source. These environments, are considered to be alternative architectures for the purposes of installing an OS into, and are not considered to be a real supported x86 hardware platform. We also do not officially support systems which have had any form of 3rd party kernel module inserted into the running kernel since boot time - even if the module has been subsequently unloaded. Once a kernel module has been loaded into the running kernel, it has the potential to manipulate all internal kernel data structures, and modify arbitrary memory, either intentionally, or unintentionally due to a bug of some kind. VMware and other similar software typically include and require a special kernel module to be loaded in order for them to function correctly. These modules, as stated above, are not supported by Red Hat, and once a user has loaded them, their system is unsupported unless they can reproduce any problems they experience after a fresh boot of the OS, without loading any non-Red Hat supplied kernel modules. Red Hat does not support any system which is using kernel modules that did not ship with the distribution or as an erratum update. We simply receive too many bug reports from users using such systems, and we are unable to support such setups. Some users have also asked about the VMware XFree86 video driver named "vmware_drv.o". In the past, we did provide the vmware_drv.o driver at one point, however we have received far too may bug reports, and user technical support queries, etc. from people, many of whom expected that since Red Hat shipped the driver in Red Hat Linux, then we were under some obligation to offer support for it. Since we can not, and do not support it, it was decided to remove the driver from the distribution. Users who require the vmware_drv.o XFree86 driver however, you may obtain it from www.vmware.com or compile it themselves from XFree86 source code, however as mentioned above, this is totally unsupported by Red Hat. If you encounter problems with the distribution under VMware or similar environments, or while using any proprietary or other 3rd party kernel modules, please ensure that the bug/problem exists also under Red Hat Linux running natively on a real processor without VMware being used and/or loaded before reporting any software problems. In closing, while we do not support VMware and similar environments, and do not do official distribution tests with it, we do hope that the distribution works well nonetheless in those types of environments, and when possible, we try to look into any reasonable bug report and make things play as nicely as possible as time permits. There is currently no intention to include the XFree86 vmware driver in the distribution, nor to provide any type of support for VMware and other similar types of virtual OS/Hardware platforms.
Closing report as NOTABUG, as problems that occur while using the operating system in an unsupported manner, which are not reproduceable otherwise, are not considered Red Hat Linux bugs. If you have a bug report which is closed as a duplicate of this report, please report it to the vendor of the product you are using, or to the upstream developers whom are responsible for maintaining the software you are using.
*** Bug 82444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 72153 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 92200 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Removing the alias because it's too generic (messes up with simple searches). Since this was closed as NOTABUG, I assume it's no big deal.