Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] Deprecate support for 32-bit x86 and arm hosts

["Philippe Mathieu-Daudé" <philmd@linaro.org>]

On 2/3/23 17:31, 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 x86 host support and for system emulation on
> 32-bit arm hosts anymore, so it should be fine if we drop these host
> environments soon (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).

It is not clear from your cover that the deprecation only concern system
emulation on these hosts, not user emulation.

I wonder about tools. Apparently they depend on sysemu now. I was
building a 'configure --enable-tools --disable-system' but now it
is empty.