On 09/22/09 21:30, Alok Kataria wrote:

Hi Ingo,

On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 00:42 -0700, Ingo Molnar wrote:

quoted

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of vmware users dont benefit
from hardware features like nested page tables yet. So this needs to be
done _way_ more carefully, with a proper sunset period of a couple of
kernel cycles.

I am fine with that too. Below is a patch which adds notes in
feature-removal-schedule.txt, I have marked it for removal from 2.6.34.
Please consider this patch for 2.6.32.

Hmm.  Given that you are talking about vmi not being supported any more 
in *future* products, there is a huge installed base with vmi support 
available, right?  I don't think we should zap the code that quickly.

  config VMI
-	bool "VMI Guest support"
-	select PARAVIRT
-	depends on X86_32
+	bool "VMI Guest support [will be deprecated soon]"
+	default n
+	depends on X86_32&&  PARAVIRT
  	---help---
  	  VMI provides a paravirtualized interface to the VMware ESX server
  	  (it could be used by other hypervisors in theory too, but is not
  	  at the moment), by linking the kernel to a GPL-ed ROM module
  	  provided by the hypervisor.
+	  VMware has started a phased retirement of this feature from there
+	  products. Please see feature-removal-schedule.txt for details.

How about adding version numbers here?  i.e. latest versions with vmi 
support are workstation x.y, ...

So people can easily figure whenever it makes sense to turn this on for 
their environment.

cheers
   Gerd