VMSOCK(9)							   Open VM Tools							 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 reserva-
       tion 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).

2010.03.20-243334						    2010-04-08								 VMSOCK(9)