“Host SMBus controller not enabled!”

CentOS guest instances in VMware sometimes come up with the boot error message:

piix4_smbus 0000:00:007.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled!

This error is being caused because VMware doesn’t actually provide that level interface for CPU access, but Ubuntu try to load the kernel module anyway.

How to fix it:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add the line:

blacklist i2c-piix4

Reboot.

NOTE: for older versions use blacklist i2c_piix4 instead.
NOTE: it works both in VMWare Fusion 5 and 6, and Ubuntu LTS 12.04 and 14.04