I finally acquired up some more horsepower for my lab, the other day (since a single Athlon 64 couldn't handle 9x dynamips instances and 5x VMs).  Other than the forcedeth driver (from linux-image-2.6.18-4-amd64) reading the MAC address in the wrong byte order, installation of Debian Lenny amd64 (testing) was uneventful.  I found out shortly after that this happens to be resolved in the linux-image-2.6.21-2-amd64 package.

VMware Server 1.0.3 (build 44356) installed fine, after applying the recommended patch, downgrading module-init-tools and installing the following compatibility packages:

• ia32-libs
• lib32bz2-1.0
• lib32gcc1
• lib32ncurses5
• lib32objc1
• lib32readline5
• lib32stdc++6
• lib32z1
• libc6-i386

However, starting any VM results in a host system hang, several seconds into the bootup process of the guest OS.  The log displays the following:

Jul 16 20:42:13: vcpu-0| MONITOR PANIC: vcpu-0:DoubleFault @ 0x4020:0x8a3b4 (0x63,0x2cc0)
Jul 16 20:42:13: vcpu-0| Core dump with build build-44356
[...]
Jul 16 20:42:14: vcpu-0| Monitor Panic. Last Disk I/O was to the MBR
Jul 16 20:42:14: vcpu-0| Msg_Post: Error
Jul 16 20:42:14: vcpu-0| [msg.log.monpanic.beta] *** VMware Server internal monitor error ***
Jul 16 20:42:14: vcpu-0| vcpu-0:DoubleFault @ 0x4020:0x8a3b4 (0x63,0x2cc0)
Jul 16 20:42:14: vcpu-0| There is a problem in this version of VMware Server.

Seems to happen with the two guests I've tried, which are Red Hat Enterprise 5.0 Server and Debian/GNU Linux 4.0.  Toying with noapic and other kernel arguments in the guest doesn't seem to help.  I suspect something is going horribly wrong with the vmnet module, since that's the only VMware module that is resident at the time.  I'd submit a bug report to VMware, but I'm not running a “supported” host OS.

Oh well, at least dynamips runs nicely.

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