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>
diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
index 842aa9d..5e2bc4a 100644
--- a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
+++ b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt
@@ -386,34 +386,6 @@
----------------------------
-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>
-
-----------------------------
-
What: Support for lcd_switch and display_get in asus-laptop driver
When: March 2010
Why: These two features use non-standard interfaces. There are the
diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index 2c85c06..5824098 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -455,7 +455,7 @@
[ARM] imx_timer1,OSTS,netx_timer,mpu_timer2,
pxa_timer,timer3,32k_counter,timer0_1
[AVR32] avr32
- [X86-32] pit,hpet,tsc,vmi-timer;
+ [X86-32] pit,hpet,tsc;
scx200_hrt on Geode; cyclone on IBM x440
[MIPS] MIPS
[PARISC] cr16