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>