VMSOCK(9)

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(1)
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 <mail@daniel-baumann.ch>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).