Simply put, all the patches in Googledom, and all the threads on this board I can find, address compiling VMware Workstation on Linux *hosts*.
Those patches simply do not correlate with the module sources I am looking at on the guest side.
The environment I'm particularly interested in is Debian Sid, but this seems to be a generic problem with all 3.2 kernels, so I won't go into great detail.
3.1 seems to be the absolute limit for 8.0.2, just as 3.0 was the absolute limit for 8.0.1 (you may recall when vmhgfs caused a kernel oops in 3.1).