Re: [PATCH 0/2] Deprecate support for 32-bit x86 and arm hosts

On 27/02/2023 19.38, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 12:10:48PM +0100, Thomas Huth wrote: > > We're struggling quite badly with our CI minutes on the shared > > gitlab runners, so we urgently need to think of ways to cut down > > our supported build and target environments. qemu-system-i386 and > > qemu-system-arm are not really required anymore, since nobody uses > > KVM on the corresponding systems for production anymore, and the > > -x86_64 and -arch64 variants are a proper superset of those binaries. > > So it's time to deprecate them and the corresponding 32-bit host > > environments now. > > > > This is a follow-up patch series from the previous discussion here: > > > > https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20230130114428.1297295-1-thuth@redhat.... > > > > where people still mentioned that there is still interest in certain > > support for 32-bit host hardware. But as far as I could see, there is > > no real need for 32-bit host support for system emulation on x86 and > > arm anymore, so it should be fine if we drop these host environments > > now (these are also the two architectures that contribute the most to > > the long test times in our CI, so we would benefit a lot by dropping > > those). > > Your description here is a little ambiguous about what's being > proposed. When you say dropping 32-bit host support do you mean > just for the system emulator binaries, or for QEMU entirely ? Just for system emulation. Some people said that user emulation still might be useful for some 32-bit environments. > And when the deprecation period is passed, are you proposing > to actively prevent 32-bit builds, or merely stopping CI testing > and leave 32-bit builds still working if people want them ? CI is the main pain point, so that's the most important thing. So whether we throw a warning or a hard error while configuring the build, I don't care too much.