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x86, vmi: Mark VMI deprecated and schedule it for removal

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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>
This commit is contained in:
Alok Kataria 2009-09-29 10:25:24 -07:00 committed by Ingo Molnar
parent f579bbcd9b
commit d0153ca35d
3 changed files with 41 additions and 2 deletions
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30
Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
View file

@ -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>
----------------------------

11
arch/x86/Kconfig
View file

@ -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

2
arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c
View file

@ -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;