Extracted vmmon module source can be found in this repository: https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules Branch "workstation" contains unpatched source from VMware, it's just unpacked tarballs from Workstation installers, tags "w${version}" mark snapshots from different versions (the latest is w17.0.1). However, these modules are only a small part of the implementation, most of the hypervisor is in userspace binary which is not open source. Some more links of discussions about the issue: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/VMWare-workstation-in-a-fistfight-with-Linux-Memory-Compactor/m-p/2876992#M172320 https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/kcompacd0-using-100-CPU-with-VMware-Workstation-16/m-p/2896972#M174448 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/679706/kcompacd0-using-100-cpu-with-vmware-workstation-16#713470 But those mostly gather empirical workarounds, AFAICS. My personal experience so far is that I hit the issue few times and both disabling THP and setting vm.vm/compaction_proactiveness=0 worked around it when it happened.