Linux Driver Compatibility - IO Devices
While ESX software itself is not derived from Linux, it includes a Linux compatibility module to allow Linux storage and networking drivers to be adapted andrecompiled for ESX hosts. This enables VMware and VMware partners to more easily support a wide range of high performance devices and eases the driver
porting effort on the storage and networking device vendors. VMware or VMware partners typically modifies these drivers for one or more of the following reasons:
* To make the driver compatible with the ESX host
* To tune the driver for performance
* To add I/O resource governing or QoS support to the driver
* To fix generic bugs in the driver
It is not possible to directly load existing, pre compiled, Linux device driver binaries onto an ESX host.