qemu-system-aarch64 is a proper superset of qemu-system-arm, and the latter was mainly still required for 32-bit KVM support. But this 32-bit KVM arm support has been dropped in the Linux kernel a couple of years ago already,so we don't really need qemu-system-arm anymore, thus deprecated it now. Additionally, it's quite unlikely that anybody is still running full system emulation on a 32-bit arm host nowadays. All recent strong arm host machines should support 64-bit now, so we also deprecate the 32-bit hosts here to finally save some precious minutes in our CI. Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@xxxxxxxxxx> --- docs/about/deprecated.rst | 17 +++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst index 98517f5187..a52e45b570 100644 --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst @@ -208,6 +208,23 @@ QEMU will soon drop the support for 32-bit x86 host systems and the ``qemu-system-i386`` binary. Use ``qemu-system-x86_64`` (which is a proper superset of ``qemu-system-i386``) on a 64-bit host machine instead. +System emulation on 32-bit arm hosts and ``qemu-system-arm`` (since 8.0) +'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' + +``qemu-system-aarch64`` is a proper superset of ``qemu-system-arm``. The +latter was mainly a requirement for running KVM on 32-bit arm hosts, but +this 32-bit KVM support has been removed some years ago already (see: +https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=541ad0150ca4 +). Thus the QEMU project will drop the ``qemu-system-arm`` binary in a +future release -- use ``qemu-system-aarch64`` instead. + +Since you need a strong host machine for running full system emulation, +and all recent strong hosts support 64-bit anyway, the QEMU project +also deprecates the support for running any system emulation on 32-bit +arm hosts in general. Use 64-bit arm hosts for system emulation instead. +(Note: "user" mode emulation continuous to be supported on 32-bit arm +hosts, too) + QEMU API (QAPI) events ---------------------- -- 2.31.1
