The following commit has been merged in the linux branch: commit d0153ca35d344d9b640dc305031b0703ba3f30f0 Author: Alok Kataria akataria@vmware.com Date: Tue Sep 29 10:25:24 2009 -0700

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

diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt index 89a47b5..04e6c81 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 + +---------------------------- diff --git a/arch/x86/Kconfig b/arch/x86/Kconfig index c876bac..07e0114 100644 --- a/arch/x86/Kconfig +++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig @@ -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 diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c b/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c index 31e6f6c..d430e4c 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/vmi_32.c @@ -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;