On Thu, Feb 23, 2023, Maxim Levitsky wrote: > On Thu, 2023-02-23 at 08:01 +0100, Thomas Huth wrote: > > On 22/02/2023 23.27, Sean Christopherson wrote: > > > On Fri, Feb 17, 2023, Thomas Huth wrote: > > > > On 29/09/2022 15.52, Maxim Levitsky wrote: > > > > > On Thu, 2022-09-29 at 15:26 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > > > > > > On 9/28/22 19:55, Sean Christopherson wrote: > > > > > > > > As far as my opinion goes I do volunteer to test this code more often, > > > > > > > > and I do not want to see the 32 bit KVM support be removed*yet*. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Yeah, I 100% agree that it shouldn't be removed until we have equivalent test > > > > > > > coverage. But I do think it should an "off-by-default" sort of thing. Maybe > > > > > > > BROKEN is the wrong dependency though? E.g. would EXPERT be a better option? > > > > > > > > > > > > Yeah, maybe EXPERT is better but I'm not sure of the equivalent test > > > > > > coverage. 32-bit VMX/SVM kvm-unit-tests are surely a good idea, but > > > > > > what's wrong with booting an older guest? > > > > > > From my point of view, using the same kernel source for host and the guest > > > > > is easier because you know that both kernels behave the same. > > > > > > > > > > About EXPERT, IMHO these days most distros already dropped 32 bit suport thus anyway > > > > > one needs to compile a recent 32 bit kernel manually - thus IMHO whoever > > > > > these days compiles a 32 bit kernel, knows what they are doing. > > > > > > > > > > I personally would wait few more releases when there is a pressing reason to remove > > > > > this support. > > > > > > > > FWIW, from the QEMU perspective, it would be very helpful to remove 32-bit > > > > KVM support from the kernel. The QEMU project currently struggles badly with > > > > keeping everything tested in the CI in a reasonable amount of time. The > > > > 32-bit KVM kernel support is the only reason to keep the qemu-system-i386 > > > > binary around - everything else can be covered with the qemu-system-x86_64 > > > > binary that is a superset of the -i386 variant (except for the KVM part as > > > > far as I know). > > > > Sure, we could also drop qemu-system-i386 from the CI without dropping the > > > > 32-bit KVM code in the kernel, but I guess things will rather bitrot there > > > > even faster in that case, so I'd appreciate if the kernel could drop the > > > > 32-bit in the near future, too. > > > > > > Ya, I would happily drop support for 32-bit kernels today, the only sticking point > > > is the lack of 32-bit shadow paging test coverage, which unfortunately is a rather > > > large point. :-( > > > > From your point of view, would it be OK if QEMU dropped qemu-system-i386? > > I.e. would it be fine to use older versions of QEMU only for that test > > coverage (or do you even use a different userspace for testing that)? For me personally, I have no objection to dropping qemu-system-i386 support in future QEMU releases. I update my 32-bit images very, very infrequently, so I probably wouldn't even notice for like 5 years :-) > From my point of view qemu-system-x86_64 does run 32 bit guests just fine. Right, but unless I seriously misunderstand what qemu-system-x86_64 ecompasses, it can't be used to run guests of 32-bit _hosts_, which is what we need to test shadowing of 32-bit NPT.
