NAME¶
vmsock - vmware kernel module
SYNOPSIS¶
modprobe vmsock
DESCRIPTION¶
This is a Linux kernel device driver module that provides datagram and stream
socket interfaces to the underlying VMCI device. The module implements a Linux
socket family and one of the files in the module, vmci_sockets.h, provides the
various constants and functions necessary to create and, in the case of
streams, connect sockets.
When the module is loaded, /dev/vsock will be created with restricted
permissions. Access to /dev/vsock is required to use VMCI sockets, so it's
recommended that permissions be relaxed via a udev policy file. For reference,
the VMware Tools init script changes the permissions of /dev/vsock to 666.
Normally, issuing a
socket(2) system call will automatically load the kernel
module providing that socket family, but as the vsock module is out-of-tree,
there is no in-tree socket family reservation for VMCI sockets. Before sockets
are created, userspace applications must call VMCISock_GetAFValue (defined in
vmci_sockets.h) which will instruct the vsock module to dynamically acquire a
socket family reservation from the kernel. This function is implemented via
ioctl(2) into the vsock module, so the vsock module must be manually loaded by
the user (perhaps using /etc/modules).
The vmci_sockets.h header should be installed in a system-wide location. We
recommend /usr/include/vmci.
The vsock module depends on symbols from the vmci module, and so the vmci module
must be loaded first.
OPTIONS¶
vmsock has no options.
SEE ALSO¶
vmware-checkvm(1)
vmware-hgfsclient(1)
vmware-toolbox(1)
vmware-toolbox-cmd(1)
vmware-user(1)
vmware-xferlogs(1)
libguestlib(3)
libvmtools(3)
vmware-guestd(8)
vmware-hgfsmounter(8)
vmware-user-suid-wrapper(8)
vmblock(9)
vmci(9)
vmhgfs(9)
vmmemctl(9)
vmsock(9)
vmxnet(9)
vmxnet3(9)
HOMEPAGE¶
More information about vmsock and the Open VM Tools can be found at <
http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/>.
AUTHOR¶
Open VM Tools were written by VMware, Inc. <
http://www.vmware.com/>.
This manual page was put together from homepage materials by Daniel Baumann <
daniel.baumann@progress-technologies.net>, for the Debian project
(but may be used by others).
