• Alok Kataria's avatar
    x86, vmware: Remove deprecated VMI kernel support · 9863c90f
    Alok Kataria authored
    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: default avatarAlok N Kataria <akataria@vmware.com>
    LKML-Reference: <1282600151.19396.22.camel@ank32.eng.vmware.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
    9863c90f
feature-removal-schedule.txt 19.8 KB