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Commit d0153ca3 authored by Alok Kataria's avatar Alok Kataria Committed by Ingo Molnar
Browse files

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: default avatarAlok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Acked-by: default avatarChris 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: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
parent f579bbcd

Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt

+30 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -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>



----------------------------

arch/x86/Kconfig

+10 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -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

arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c

+1 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -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;