Re: [PATCH v3] Allow building qemu tools on 32-bit hosts

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:

> On Sun, Apr 05, 2026 at 12:40:16AM +0200, Helge Deller wrote:
>> Qemu's tools like qemu-img are often needed on 32-bit platforms,
>> although the actual qemu emulators have been discontinued on 32-bit.
>
> IMHO, the thought behind disabling 32-bit builds was not making
> a statement about whether the code was useful on 32-bit platforms.
> Users of 32-bit platforms will naturally always want to have as
> much as possible available on their platform.
>
> Rather it was that 32-bit platforms were no longer considered
> important as targets by QEMU maintainers. The goal is thus to
> reduce the set of targets that maintainers have to think about.
>
> Thus the commit message needs to be justifying why 32-bit platforms
> should still be treated as a target.
>
> In terms of the impact on QEMU maintainers / subsystems we see
>
>  * QEMU guest agent
>
>     => util/, qapi/, qobject/, qom/, qga/
>
>    Total about 300  C files
>
>  * Adding in tools on top we also get
>
>     => block/, chardev/, crypto/, io/, authz/, storage-daemon/
>
>    Total about 700 C files
>
>
> I'll support the build of QEMU guest agent on 32-bit, as we were
> clear that we wanted to continue supporting 32-bit guests in
> general.
>
> I'm not in favour of re-introducing 32-bit support  for anything
> else.

Neither am I.