VMware and GPL – it's about api boundaries, not copy-paste

I'm personally more interested in the technical design of ESXi than the legal issues (this is fascinating stuff :), it would be interesting to see an accurate diagram showing where the machine architectural boundaries are when all these pieces are running.

At runtime, where is vmkernel actually executing on a modern x86-64 machine? Where are vmkLinux and the GPL'd drivers executing relative to vmkernel?

Just out of curiosity, what's GPL advocates and FSF's attitude toward APIs and implementation? Since vmkernel uses glibc, it has to implement all the Linux system calls right?

Were there any claims for GPLed programs' APIs before?