From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge Subject: Re: Paravirtualization on VMware's Platform [VMI]. Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:53:33 -0700 Message-ID: <4AB2DA0D.8020606@goop.org> References: <1253233028.19731.63.camel@ank32.eng.vmware.com> <20090918003412.GI26034@sequoia.sous-sol.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20090918003412.GI26034@sequoia.sous-sol.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Chris Wright Cc: Alok Kataria , Ingo Molnar , Thomas Gleixner , "H. Peter Anvin" , the arch/x86 maintainers , LKML , Rusty Russell , virtualization@lists.osdl.org List-Id: virtualization@lists.linuxfoundation.org On 09/17/09 17:34, Chris Wright wrote: >> One of the options that I am contemplating is to drop the code from the >> tip tree in this release cycle, and given that this should be a low risk >> change we can remove it from Linus's tree later in the merge cycle. >> >> Let me know your views on this or if you think we should do this some >> other way. >> > Typically we give time measured in multiple release cycles > before deprecating a feature. This means placing an entry in > Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt, and potentially > adding some noise to warn users they are using a deprecated > feature. > That's true if the feature has some functional effect on users. But at first sight, VMI is really just an optimisation, and a non-VMI-equipped kernel would be completely functionally equivalent, right? On the other hand, there could well be a performance regression which could affect users. However they're taking the explicit step of withdrawing support for VMI, so I guess they can just take that in their stride. J