VMWare Network Hickups ( sent link down event. )

I ran into this because I went to a hotel that had DHCP renew every 300 seconds, trying to download something inside the VM was getting clobbered...

If you check your syslog or kern.log and see the following entries; then I might have the solution for you:

kernel: [235397.022939] userif-3: sent link down event.
kernel: [235397.022943] userif-3: sent link up event.

Then the issue is one that when your DHCP renews it calls into the kernel with the new information; unfortunately this causes VMWare Workstation & Player (might effect other VMWare products?) to reset its network stack, even though nothing changed...

The solution after a lot of time googling different terms and trying to figure out what exactly was going on. I finally found it here (by Jan Just Keijer): https://www.nikhef.nl/~janjust/vmnet/ (The original link is now dead, you can read it on Wayback machine here) it was for an much older version of VMWare Player; but the solution still applies to VMWare workstation 16 & 17...

To make sure the information doesn't just disappear in the future (and so I can easily find it myself) I'm going to quote the relevant code and/or modifications I did..

Extract the /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet-only.tar tar file, you need to modify the userif.c file. Search it for VNetUserIfSetUplinkState function and right after the variable declaration add if (!linkUp) return 0;

// Around line 966
VNetUserIfSetUplinkState(VNetPort *port, uint8 linkUp)
 {
    VNetUserIF *userIf;
    VNetJack *hubJack;
    VNet_LinkStateEvent event;
    int retval;

    /* ADD: never send link down events */   
    if (!linkUp) return 0;
    /* END Added code */
    
    ... rest of code ...

This will eliminate the linkdown events; which disconnect the internet from the VMWare network driver...

After you do that; recreate the vmnet-only.tar and replace the original. Then you can run: /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

And then either
systemctl restart vmware
or
service vmware restart

If you still see " sent link down event." in your logs; then the patch wasn't applied properly.

There is also a GitHub issue for this issue, that has been sitting open since early 2022. It is unlikely this issue will be fixed unless there is a lot of people thumb upping that they run into this...

Finally, you can also clone the latest vmware network modules source code (you still have to apply this patch) from https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules