VMPlayer: kernel.sched_compat_yield not set

Since my desktop machine at home has now had a bit of an upgrade I'm now running several VMWare instances (Windows 7 - more on this in another post - and Ubuntu 32bit - avoids pesky problems with Flash and some other tools not being available/stable in 64bit versions).

I've kept getting the above error in a dialog every time I start VMWare Player so I had a read of the upstart documentation (the replacement for SysV init) and also found the script that is meant to be reading the values from /etc/sysctl.d

# procps - set sysctls from /etc/sysctl.conf
#
# This task sets kernel sysctl variables from /etc/sysctl.conf and
# /etc/sysctl.d

description "set sysctls from /etc/sysctl.conf"

start on virtual-filesystems

task
script
cat /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf /etc/sysctl.conf | sysctl -e -p -
end script

The issue turned out to be because the file added by VMWare Player doesn't have a .conf suffix so never gets picked up by the above script, fixed this with a link to that file with the appropriate name, 30-vmware-player.conf which should pick things up properly from now on.