Hardly anybody still uses 32-bit x86 hosts today, so we should start deprecating them to finally have less test efforts. With regards to 32-bit KVM support in the x86 Linux kernel, the developers confirmed that they do not need a recent qemu-system-i386 binary here: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/Y%2ffkTs5ajFy0hP1U@xxxxxxxxxx/ Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@xxxxxxxxxx> --- docs/about/deprecated.rst | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst index 15084f7bea..98517f5187 100644 --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst @@ -196,6 +196,19 @@ CI coverage support may bitrot away before the deprecation process completes. The little endian variants of MIPS (both 32 and 64 bit) are still a supported host architecture. +32-bit x86 hosts and ``qemu-system-i386`` (since 8.0) +''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' + +Testing 32-bit x86 host OS support takes a lot of precious time during the +QEMU contiguous integration tests, and considering that most OS vendors +stopped shipping 32-bit variants of their x86 OS distributions and most +x86 hardware from the past >10 years is capable of 64-bit, keeping the +32-bit support alive is an inadequate burden for the QEMU project. Thus +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. + + QEMU API (QAPI) events ---------------------- -- 2.31.1
