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

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

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.

IMHO, the qga probably ought to be a separate project, but it has
a core dependancy on the QAPI code generator, and some of the related
shared C code (qobject/, qapi/ and some parts of util/), but even that
is quite a tangled web of deps.

With regards,
Daniel
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