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authorAlok Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>2009-09-29 13:25:24 -0400
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2009-10-08 16:27:55 -0400
commitd0153ca35d344d9b640dc305031b0703ba3f30f0 (patch)
tree969edf8a9d389abf5cded1af6dcf9334ddd235cf /Documentation
parentf579bbcd9bb8b688df03191b92c56ab8af4d6322 (diff)
x86, vmi: Mark VMI deprecated and schedule it for removal
Add text in feature-removal.txt indicating that VMI will be removed in the 2.6.37 timeframe. Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com> Acked-by: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org> LKML-Reference: <1254193238.13456.48.camel@ank32.eng.vmware.com> [ removed a bogus Kconfig change, marked (DEPRECATED) in Kconfig ] Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt30
1 files changed, 30 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
index 89a47b5aff07..04e6c819b28a 100644
--- a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
+++ b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
@@ -451,3 +451,33 @@ Why: OSS sound_core grabs all legacy minors (0-255) of SOUND_MAJOR
451 will also allow making ALSA OSS emulation independent of 451 will also allow making ALSA OSS emulation independent of
452 sound_core. The dependency will be broken then too. 452 sound_core. The dependency will be broken then too.
453Who: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> 453Who: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
454
455----------------------------
456
457What: Support for VMware's guest paravirtuliazation technique [VMI] will be
458 dropped.
459When: 2.6.37 or earlier.
460Why: With the recent innovations in CPU hardware acceleration technologies
461 from Intel and AMD, VMware ran a few experiments to compare these
462 techniques to guest paravirtualization technique on VMware's platform.
463 These hardware assisted virtualization techniques have outperformed the
464 performance benefits provided by VMI in most of the workloads. VMware
465 expects that these hardware features will be ubiquitous in a couple of
466 years, as a result, VMware has started a phased retirement of this
467 feature from the hypervisor. We will be removing this feature from the
468 Kernel too. Right now we are targeting 2.6.37 but can retire earlier if
469 technical reasons (read opportunity to remove major chunk of pvops)
470 arise.
471
472 Please note that VMI has always been an optimization and non-VMI kernels
473 still work fine on VMware's platform.
474 Latest versions of VMware's product which support VMI are,
475 Workstation 7.0 and VSphere 4.0 on ESX side, future maintainence
476 releases for these products will continue supporting VMI.
477
478 For more details about VMI retirement take a look at this,
479 http://blogs.vmware.com/guestosguide/2009/09/vmi-retirement.html
480
481Who: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
482
483----------------------------