So I was upgrading the kernel on my wife's laptop (its a long story) and I had an issue with vmplayer.  The issue was it would not compile the vmware kernel modules.  For the record the laptop has KUbuntu 10.04, I had just upgraded the kernel to 2.6.36-1, and I had grabbed the latest vmplayer (3.1.3 at the time).  The error message was as follows:

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.36-1-generic'

CC [M] /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c: In function `init_module':

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:425: error: `struct file_operations' has no member named `ioctl'

make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1

make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only] Error 2

make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.36-1-generic' make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2

make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only'

As it turns out this is because vmplayer apparently does not support 2.6.36 yet.  According to a Gentoo bug report I found "With the 2.6.36 release it has been removed the ioctl() method from the file_operations structure. All the drivers should now call unlocked_ioctl() which doesn't run under the Big Kernel Lock (BKL)."  So I applied the patch as root:

cd /tmp

tar xf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmmon.tar

patch -p0 < /root/1.0.0.26-ioctl.patch

tar cf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmmon.tar vmmon-only/

After which vmplayer compiled the modules just fine.  Thank you Gentoo community. 

Gentoo bug report and patches can be found here.

I hope this will help someone else.