I've also seen this, on 5.14.0-435.el9 and the 17.5.0 branch. The root cause is that csum_and_copy_to_user has been removed from Module.symvers.

These Redhat kernels appear to contain a lot of backports from kernel 6. Hence to get the vmware_host_modules code to compile I've implemented a quick and dirty patch to replace or add to the "#if kernel >= 6.x" type of compilation conditions with something like "#if kernel == 5.14.0".

In this case a patch is needed to vmnet-only/userif.c.

something like "#if kernel == 5.14.0".

This was still a problem after upgrading to kernel 5.14.0-444.el9.x86_64 so, similar to iangosling89, I edited vmnet-only/userif.c line 549:

#elif LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(5, 14, 0) /* was (5, 19, 0) */

Despite it builds alike this, it will ultimately fail when starting a VM:

Could not open /dev/vmmon: No such file or directory.
Please make sure that the kernel module `vmmon' is loaded.

Failed to initialize monitor device.

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Transport (VMDB) error -14: Pipe connection has been broken.

Which means that not only module vmnet, but likely also vmmon seems to be affected.

@mkubecek This appears to be partially related to vmlinux.

Skipping BTF generation for vmware-host-modules/vmmon-only/vmmon.ko due to unavailability of vmlinux

A sane build environment can be provided with:

sudo dnf install dwarves
sudo cp /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux /usr/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/

Then it builds without errors, but the vmmon module will not be inserted into the kernel, for some reason. Also not the vmnet module, as it turned out later, once being able to boot. This can be fixed by manually inserting them:

sudo insmod vmnet-only/vmnet.ko
sudo insmod vmmon-only/vmmon.ko

Beside that. this PR has all changes required to build on current Rocky Linux 9.5 and start a VM: fd37b30