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>

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
         will also allow making ALSA OSS emulation independent of
         sound_core.  The dependency will be broken then too.
 Who:    Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
+
+----------------------------
+
+What:   Support for VMware's guest paravirtuliazation technique [VMI] will be
+        dropped.
+When:   2.6.37 or earlier.
+Why:    With the recent innovations in CPU hardware acceleration technologies
+        from Intel and AMD, VMware ran a few experiments to compare these
+        techniques to guest paravirtualization technique on VMware's platform.
+        These hardware assisted virtualization techniques have outperformed the
+        performance benefits provided by VMI in most of the workloads. VMware
+        expects that these hardware features will be ubiquitous in a couple of
+        years, as a result, VMware has started a phased retirement of this
+        feature from the hypervisor. We will be removing this feature from the
+        Kernel too. Right now we are targeting 2.6.37 but can retire earlier if
+        technical reasons (read opportunity to remove major chunk of pvops)
+        arise.
+
+        Please note that VMI has always been an optimization and non-VMI kernels
+        still work fine on VMware's platform.
+        Latest versions of VMware's product which support VMI are,
+        Workstation 7.0 and VSphere 4.0 on ESX side, future maintainence
+        releases for these products will continue supporting VMI.
+
+        For more details about VMI retirement take a look at this,
+        http://blogs.vmware.com/guestosguide/2009/09/vmi-retirement.html
+
+Who:    Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
+
+----------------------------