diff options
| author | Alok Kataria | 2009-09-29 10:25:24 -0700 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Ingo Molnar | 2009-10-08 22:27:55 +0200 |
| commit | d0153ca35d344d9b640dc305031b0703ba3f30f0 (patch) | |
| tree | 969edf8a9d389abf5cded1af6dcf9334ddd235cf /Documentation | |
| parent | f579bbcd9bb8b688df03191b92c56ab8af4d6322 (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')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt | 30 |
1 files changed, 30 insertions, 0 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> + +---------------------------- |