x86, vmware: Remove deprecated VMI kernel support
authorAlok Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:49:11 +0000 (14:49 -0700)
committerH. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:18:50 +0000 (15:18 -0700)
commit9863c90f682fba34cdc26c3437e8c00da6c83fa4
treef21d698fc8e9e06e9205d2a941646617aeb8f31c
parent76be97c1fc945db08aae1f1b746012662d643e97
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>
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
arch/x86/Kconfig
arch/x86/include/asm/vmi.h [deleted file]
arch/x86/include/asm/vmi_time.h [deleted file]
arch/x86/kernel/Makefile
arch/x86/kernel/setup.c
arch/x86/kernel/smpboot.c
arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c [deleted file]
arch/x86/kernel/vmiclock_32.c [deleted file]