Re: [RFC PATCH] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit host systems

On 30/01/2023 13.01, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:47:02AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote: > > On Mon, 30 Jan 2023 at 11:44, Thomas Huth <thuth(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > > > > > > Testing 32-bit host OS support takes a lot of precious time during the QEMU > > > contiguous integration tests, and considering that many OS vendors stopped > > > shipping 32-bit variants of their OS distributions and most hardware from > > > the past >10 years is capable of 64-bit > > > > True for x86, not necessarily true for other architectures. > > Are you proposing to deprecate x86 32-bit, or all 32-bit? > > I'm not entirely sure about whether we're yet at a point where > > I'd want to deprecate-and-drop 32-bit arm host support. Even mobile phones have 64-bit processors nowadays, Rasberry PIs are 64-bit nowadays ... which arm hosts scenarios are still limited to 32-bit ? Also, as far as I know, 32-bit KVM arm support has been removed from the Linux kernel a while ago already, so it's just about TCG now ... is there really still that much interest in running emulation on a non-beefy 32-bit host? Anyway, we could add the deprecation notice now to find out if there are still 32-bit users out there who will then start complaining about this. > Do we have a feeling on which aspects of 32-bit cause us the support > burden ? The boring stuff like compiler errors from mismatched integer > sizes is mostly quick & easy to detect simply through a cross compile. The burden are the CI minutes of the shared CI runners. We've got quite a bunch of 32-bit jobs in the CI: - cross-armel-system - cross-armel-user - cross-armhf-system - cross-armhf-user - cross-i386-system - cross-i386-user - cross-i386-tci - cross-mipsel-system - cross-mipsel-user - cross-win32-system If we could finally drop supporting 32-bit hosts, that would help with our CI minutes problem quite a lot, I think.