Re: [Qemu-devel] Drop support for 32bit hosts in qemu? (was: [PULL 1/6] audio/hda: create millisecond timers that handle IO)

["Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>]

* Peter Maydell (peter.maydell@linaro.org) wrote:
> On 27 June 2018 at 09:52, Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   Hi,
> >
> >> > Is QEMU still useful on 32-bit hosts?  Honest question!
> >>
> >> I guess it depends on what 32-bit hosts you consider. If you look at only
> >> x86 vs. x86_64 then probably x86 is not that important any more but for some
> >> embedded systems/SoCs 32bit might still be common and QEMU useful for those
> >> (also as host not only emulated).
> 
> I would generally agree with this. For x86 32-bit is probably
> droppable, but for non-x86 the situation is much less clear.
> 
> > Well.  I've used kvm with an 32bit arm soc (cubietruck).  It's very
> > slow.  And all the arm architecture improvements to support kvm better
> > are for aarch64 only.
> 
> Cubietruck (a Cortex-A7) is a pretty slow 32-bit Arm core.
> 
> Ask again in a couple of years :-)

How about dropping support for 32 bit hosts that don't have
64bit atomics?
That should be a much smaller set.

Dave

> thanks
> -- PMM
> 
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK