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>

Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt

@@ -386,34 +386,6 @@ Who:	Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
 
 ----------------------------
 
-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

Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

@@ -455,7 +455,7 @@ and is between 256 and 4096 characters. It is defined in the file
 			[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

arch/x86/Kconfig

@@ -517,25 +517,6 @@ if PARAVIRT_GUEST
 
 source "arch/x86/xen/Kconfig"
 
-config VMI
-	bool "VMI Guest support (DEPRECATED)"
-	select PARAVIRT
-	depends on X86_32
-	---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.
-
-	  As of September 2009, VMware has started a phased retirement
-	  of this feature from VMware's products. Please see
-	  feature-removal-schedule.txt for details.  If you are
-	  planning to enable this option, please note that you cannot
-	  live migrate a VMI enabled VM to a future VMware product,
-	  which doesn't support VMI. So if you expect your kernel to
-	  seamlessly migrate to newer VMware products, keep this
-	  disabled.
-
 config KVM_CLOCK
 	bool "KVM paravirtualized clock"
 	select PARAVIRT