3 files changed, 41 insertions, 2 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>
+
+----------------------------
diff --git a/arch/x86/Kconfig b/arch/x86/Kconfig
index c876bace8fdc..07e01149e3bf 100644
--- a/arch/x86/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig
@@ -491,7 +491,7 @@ if PARAVIRT_GUEST
 source "arch/x86/xen/Kconfig"
 
 config VMI
-        bool "VMI Guest support"
+        bool "VMI Guest support (DEPRECATED)"
         select PARAVIRT
         depends on X86_32
         ---help---
@@ -500,6 +500,15 @@ config VMI
           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
diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c b/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c
index 31e6f6cfe53e..d430e4c30193 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c
@@ -648,7 +648,7 @@ static inline int __init activate_vmi(void)
 
         pv_info.paravirt_enabled = 1;
         pv_info.kernel_rpl = kernel_cs & SEGMENT_RPL_MASK;
-        pv_info.name = "vmi";
+        pv_info.name = "vmi [deprecated]";
 
         pv_init_ops.patch = vmi_patch;