Re: [PATCH v2 4/6] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate the qemu-system-arm binary
On 02/03/2023 23.16, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 2/3/23 17:31, Thomas Huth wrote:
> qemu-system-aarch64 is a proper superset of qemu-system-arm,
> and the latter was mainly still required for 32-bit KVM support.
> But this 32-bit KVM arm support has been dropped in the Linux
> kernel a couple of years ago already, so we don't really need
> qemu-system-arm anymore, thus deprecated it now.
>
> Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth(a)redhat.com>
> ---
> docs/about/deprecated.rst | 10 ++++++++++
> 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> index a30aa8dfdf..21ce70b5c9 100644
> --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> @@ -45,6 +45,16 @@ run 32-bit guests by selecting a 32-bit CPU model,
> including KVM support
> on x86_64 hosts. Thus users are recommended to reconfigure their systems
> to use the ``qemu-system-x86_64`` binary instead.
> +``qemu-system-arm`` binary (since 8.0)
>
+''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
> +
> +``qemu-system-aarch64`` is a proper superset of ``qemu-system-arm``. The
> +latter was mainly a requirement for running KVM on 32-bit arm hosts, but
> +this 32-bit KVM support has been removed some years ago already (see:
s/some/few/?
I can also use "three years ago" since the patch had been merged in March 2020.
>
+https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=541ad0150ca4
>
> +). Thus the QEMU project will drop the ``qemu-system-arm`` binary in a
> +future release. Use ``qemu-system-aarch64`` instead.
If we unify, wouldn't it be simpler to name the single qemu-system
binary emulating various ARM architectures as 'qemu-system-arm'?
That would be more intuitive for people who are completely new to QEMU, but
I guess it will cause a lot of "you broke my script that uses the -aarch64
binary" troubles again. So I think it's likely better to not go down that road.
Thomas