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

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

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.com/
> 
> 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 ?

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 ?


With regards,
Daniel
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