Re: [PATCH v2 4/6] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate the qemu-system-arm binary

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 at 16:31, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> 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@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``.

I think this is not quite true -- at the moment if you want
"every feature we implement, 32-bit" the only way to get
that is 'qemu-system-arm -cpu max'. The '-cpu max' on
qemu-system-aarch64 is 64-bit, and we don't implement for TCG
the "-cpu max,aarch64=off" syntax that we do for KVM that would
let the user say "no 64-bit support".

thanks
-- PMM