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authorAlok Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>2009-09-29 10:25:24 -0700
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2009-10-08 22:27:55 +0200
commitd0153ca35d344d9b640dc305031b0703ba3f30f0 (patch)
tree969edf8a9d389abf5cded1af6dcf9334ddd235cf /Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
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/feature-removal-schedule.txt')
-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 89a47b5aff0..04e6c819b28 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>
+
+----------------------------