VMWare Fusion allows one to use folders on the OSX filesystem from within the guest OS via Shared Folders.
This is useful if you need to access files from both the host OS (OSX) or the guest OS running in VMWare Fusion.
However I have found limitations with this arrangement when the guest OS is a Linux-based system -- it seems that VMWare's driver for Shared Folders does not support all of the linux filesystem operations (most specifically hard links).
Observe (/mnt/hgfs/wa points to a shared folder residing on the OSX filesystem) :
clermontr@synergy:/mnt/hgfs/wa/test$ touch tree
clermontr@synergy:/mnt/hgfs/wa/test$ ln tree shrub
ln: creating hard link `shrub' to `tree': Operation not permitted
Operation not permitted?! How about symbolic links:
clermontr@synergy:/mnt/hgfs/wa/test$ ln -s tree shrub
clermontr@synergy:/mnt/hgfs/wa/test$ ll
total 1
lrwxr-xr-x 1 clermontr ccm_root 4 2008-05-15 14:17 shrub -> tree
-rw-r--r-- 1 clermontr ccm_root 0 2008-05-15 14:16 tree
clermontr@synergy:/mnt/hgfs/wa/test$
Well it looks like symbolic links are permitted, but no chance for hard links. For what it's worth I also attempted to hard-link as sudo but to no avail.
Switching to the OSX filesystem I was able to create hard-links without issue. So then it would appear that this is indeed a limitation of the VMWare Fusion Shared Folders driver (vmhgfs).
I am interested in hearing if others have experienced this issue, and also if anyone has found a workaround.
