Where are Kernel Headers for Fedora 21?

Question

I'm trying to install VMware on Fedora 21. I've installed the kernel headers:

sudo yum install kernel-headers-`uname -r`

And I receive the following message:

Package kernel-headers-3.18.5-201.fc21.x86_64 already installed

However, there's nothing in /usr/src/kernels:

$ ls /usr/src
$ debug     kernels
$ ls /usr/src/kernels/
$

I guess something has changed, and I'm looking in the wrong place.

Where are the kernel headers located in Fedora 21?

Solution 1

To compile programs that build Linux kernel modules, such as VMware Tools, VMware Workstation, etc., you should install both the relevant kernel-headers and kernel-devel packages.

The kernel-headers package provides include files for compiling userland programs, especially the C library, while the kernel-devel package provides include files for compiling kernel modules (which VMware Tools is full of).

---

Also note carefully that VMware currently recommends that you not compile VMware Tools yourself on guest operating systems which provide open-vm-tools, but you should install open-vm-tools instead. For example:

yum install open-vm-tools

Solution 2

The yum command is rpm based, and so to list the contents of a package use

rpm -ql package-name

So in your case

rpm -ql kernel-headers-3.18.5-201.fc21.x86_64

should reveal where your headers are.

Have you tried /usr/include/linux? When you find out could you post the actual location?

Hope this helps

Comments

[Junior Mayhé]

after running yum -y kernel-devel-`uname -r` kernel-headers-`uname -r` my installation hangs on the message Starting vmware-tools (via systemctl)