Update open-vm-tools to latest version 12.3.0

[Grandma-Betty]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

Not really an issue, but is it possible to update open-vm-tools to the latest version 12.3.0? There have many improvements and security fixes being made since the 11.3.5 version that HAOS has implemented. Should not be such a thing as it is part of the buildroot package and only the .ova image would be affected, right?
Thank you in advance and -as always- thank you for your great work!

EDIT: I just mentioned the version on the official buildroot package is also the outdated version 11.3.5. Is there any reason for that?

What operating system image do you use?

ova (for Virtual Machines)

What version of Home Assistant Operating System is installed?

6.1.45

Did you upgrade the Operating System.

Yes

Steps to reproduce the issue

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

-

Anything in the Host logs that might be useful for us?

-

System information

No response

Additional information

No response

[agners]

Is there any reason for that?

The reason that open-vm-tools did not got updated in upstream buildroot? Lack of interest/contributors I guess.

The open-vm-tools is one of these packages which are just annoying to maintain: Quite some patches needed to make it work, and upstream has a rather annoying contributor license agreement process.

I'll give it a try, if upgrading is somewhat straight forward I can probably handle it.

[Grandma-Betty]

I once compiled version 11 to make XPEnology (Synology DSM in a VM) work better in VMware environment (it's on one of my Git repositories). I remember running into a hassle back then but the developers of open-vm-tools were very helpful. Just in case you need help from them, it's worth asking I guess ;-)

[agners]

I've started an attempt, but the patches in buildroot do not cleanly apply to the current version. Also rebasing them is non-trivial, at least for some (specifically 0007-Use-configure-to-test-for-feature-instead-of-platfor.patch).

Most of the patches are actually open PRs upstream (e.g. vmware/open-vm-tools#383 or vmware/open-vm-tools#631), but they seem not to make it through. So Buildroot and other (meta-)distributions have to keep maintain these patches 😢

I probably can reuse the latest patches from OpenEmbedded, those have been rebased to 12.1.5 at least.

[agners]

Addressed with #2735.