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.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 ?
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.