Re: [RFC PATCH] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit host systems

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

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:05:46PM +0100, Stefan Weil wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 11:36:41AM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> 
> > Which 32-bit hosts are still useful, and why?
> 
> 
> Citing my previous mail:
> 
>    I now checked all downloads of the latests installers since 2022-12-30.
> 
>    qemu-w32-setup-20221230.exe – 509 different IP addresses
>    qemu-w64-setup-20221230.exe - 5471 different IP addresses
> 
>    339 unique IP addresses are common for 32- and 64-bit, either
>    crawlers or people who simply got both variants. So there remain 170
>    IP addresses which only downloaded the 32-bit variant in the last week.
> 
>    I see 437 different strings for the browser type, but surprisingly
>    none of them looks like a crawler.
> 
> So there still seems to be a certain small need for QEMU installers for
> 32-bit Windows: 170 users für 32 bit only, 339 users for both 32 and 64 bit,
> 5132 users for 64 bit only.

The question which is hard/impossible to answer is whether the people
who downloaded the 32-bit build genuinely needed a 32-bit build or
just did so out of habit or confusion.

I know you can't believe everything you see with statistics, but as an
example, the chart at the bottom of this page suggests new deployments
of 32-bit Windows are negligible today:

    https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/os-marketshare.html

there are existing deployments not accounted for there, but that may
still suggest many of the 32-bit downloads of QEMU will end up being
run on 64-bit hosts.

If we were to apply our support platform rule of only targetting the
latest 2 versions of the OS, this limits our targets to Win 10 and
Win 11. Windows 11 dropped 32-bit IIUC, so we're talking about
32-bit installs of Windows 10 only - even in Win10 days all new
physical hardware would have been 64-bit capable.

With regards,
Daniel
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