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@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by
others).