VMware Tools on FreeBSD 10.0

Problem

As of February 2014, VMware Tools that come with ESXi 5 or Fusion don’t work out of the box on FreeBSD 10. I wrote some patches so that one can compile them manually. Luckily, FreeBSD 10 comes with support for vmxnet3 virtual network cards. Anyhow, you’ll need at least the kernel source tree in /usr/src/sys, Perl, and compat6x-amd64 (or compat6x-i386).

Solution

1. Download vmware-tools-distrib.diff, vmblock-only.diff, vmmemctl-only.diff (vmmemctl-only55.diff if you’re on ESXi 5.5). Save them to e.g. /tmp/
2. In the vSphere Client, select your FreeBSD virtual machine and (right-)click Guest->Install/Upgrade VMware Tools
3. In your FreeBSD machine, do the following:

   # mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /mnt
   # tar xzf /mnt/vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz
   # cd vmware-tools-distrib
   # patch -p1 < /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib.diff
   # cd lib/modules/source/
   # tar xf vmblock.tar
   # tar xf vmmemctl.tar
   # cd vmblock-only
   # patch -p1 < /tmp/vmblock-only.diff
   # make
   # make install
   # cd ../vmmemctl-only
   # patch -p1 < /tmp/vmmemctl-only.diff # ESXi5: /tmp/vmmemctl-only55.diff
   # make
   # make install
   # cd ../../../../
   

4. You are now supposed to be in the top-level directory (vmware-tools-distrib). Run ./vmware-install.pl as usual