x86, vmware: Remove deprecated VMI kernel support

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.

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

This feature removal was scheduled for 2.6.37 back in September 2009.

Signed-off-by: Alok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
LKML-Reference: <1282600151.19396.22.camel@ank32.eng.vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 19 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/Kconfig b/arch/x86/Kconfig
index cea0cd9a316f..f0ee331feeab 100644
--- a/arch/x86/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig
@@ -517,25 +517,6 @@ if PARAVIRT_GUEST
 
 source "arch/x86/xen/Kconfig"
 
-config VMI
-        bool "VMI Guest support (DEPRECATED)"
-        select PARAVIRT
-        depends on X86_32
-        ---help---
-          VMI provides a paravirtualized interface to the VMware ESX server
-          (it could be used by other hypervisors in theory too, but is not
-          at the moment), by linking the kernel to a GPL-ed ROM module
-          provided by the hypervisor.
-
-          As of September 2009, VMware has started a phased retirement
-          of this feature from VMware's products. Please see
-          feature-removal-schedule.txt for details.  If you are
-          planning to enable this option, please note that you cannot
-          live migrate a VMI enabled VM to a future VMware product,
-          which doesn't support VMI. So if you expect your kernel to
-          seamlessly migrate to newer VMware products, keep this
-          disabled.
-
 config KVM_CLOCK
         bool "KVM paravirtualized clock"
         select PARAVIRT