This was written back in 2005-2006, and hasn't been used or tested in the last few years.

Running Linux as a VMware guest

I've found the following points useful:

Do not use the 2.6 HZ default of 1000 as it makes the host work too hard. (See include/asm-i386/param.h or set CONFIG_HZ if your kernel supports it).
Use clock=pit on the kernel command line (See the wonderfully in-depth VMware whitepaper on timekeeping.)

Kernel .config

This is an attempt to create stripped down kernels to run in VMware guests. Vendor-supplied kernels should work fine, but generally come with bloat to support many different devices. Since the hardware configuration of most VMware guests is well known, there's no point modprobing a lot of unused modules at boot.

NOTE:These are NOT kernel packages (rpm, deb, etc). They are just the .config files that should be placed into your own source tree. Building a kernel is left as an exercise to the reader. (On debian I use export APPEND_TO_VERSION="-vmwareguest" ; make-kpkg binary-arch).

2.6.8.
2.6.16.2.

There should be no problems with using one of these with a different kernel release, but use make oldconfig after saving the configuration as .oldconfig to make sure.

In standard configurations there should be no requirement for an initrd as both SCSI and IDE hard disk controllers are compiled in, along with ext3, which should be enough to get started.

What do these contain?

Uniprocessor, Pentium 3
BusLogic and LSI Logic SCSI hard disk controllers compiled into kernel (not as modules)
HZ set to 100 (I find that 1000 makes hosts work too hard for no obvious gain).
Networking support (but NOT the pcnet32 module. Compile your own vmxnet from the VMware tools)
IPtables/Netfilter support as modules
Memory Technology Devices (USB flash drives, etc) so you can pass-through your storage from the host. Consider using VMware's own hgfs system to avoid having to visit the machine room, though.
Parallel and Serial port support.
Software watchdog.
ENS1371 sound card module and ALSA.
The magic SYSRQ key combination.

There are probably things that can be chopped even further from these. In general I've tried to keep hardware as close to that available from VMware, but others as flexible as possible (EG, support for smbfs).

Please contact me (see below) if there's anything missing that prevents these configurations from working for you.

My e-mail address, hopefully in a spam defeating format

6 March 2006.