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

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

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.

With regards,
Daniel
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