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> 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.
Thomas