Re: QEMU requires a 64-bit CPU host architecture?

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2026 at 09:19, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 11:08:41AM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> > On 20.03.2026 09:45, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > Is it intentional that qemu does not build utilities on 32bit hosts
> > > anymore?
> >
> > This is
> >
> > commit 372ec46b9f1215f48a4717f2b7ed969f65bfadc6
> > Author: Richard Henderson <richard.henderson@linaro.org>
> > Date:   Thu Dec 18 09:56:27 2025 +1100
> >
> >     meson: Reject 32-bit hosts
> >
> >     32-bit hosts have been deprecated since 10.0.
> >
> > How would one build qemu-img and especially qemu-guest-agent, say,
> > on i386 or armhf?
> >
> > I tried removing this error message from meson.build (in $subject),
> > but it fails to build even the qga due to errors in atomic.h, -
> > even if these aren't used by qga.
> >
> > That smells like a bad decision, - to drop qga and qemu-img support
> > on 32bit architectures.  Especially qga.
>
> IMHO dropping the block related tools is reasonable, as if you keep
> that, the dependencies that need to remain 32-bit compatible ripple
> out across a very large part of the codebase.
>
> Not having qga though feels like a pretty undesirable consequence,
> given our message overall is that we were dropping host support but
> keeping 32-bit emulation.

Yes, I'm not sure we quite realised that we would be no longer
building QGA for 32-bits. How much effort would it be to
reinstate that?

-- PMM