Our msys2 32-bit Windows host CI job has been failing recently because upstream MSYS2 are starting to phase out 32-bit windows host support and are steadily removing i686 versions of packages. The latest is dtc: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2177
The writing is clearly on the wall for their 32-bit support, judging from the "2023-12-13 - Starting to drop some 32-bit Packages" news item at https://www.msys2.org/news/ and associated discussion at https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/discussions/19326 . QEMU on a 32-bit host is not likely to be a great experience, and I suspect we don't have many users using 32-bit Windows who couldn't use the 64-bit version instead. Our Download page points users at MSYS2's packages, and they have already dropped the 32-bit QEMU package build. Stefan Weil's binaries page, which is the other thing we link to from Download, has no 32-bit version newer than 7.2.0. So anybody using 32-bit Windows QEMU must be building it themselves. Plus, we've already deprecated system emulation on 32-bit x86 hosts, so the only remaining "supported" config is with the NVMM or WHPX accelerators. I suggest that we should: * remove the msys2-32bit CI job entirely (we will still have at least compile-time coverage via the cross-win32-system job) * document that the 32-bit Windows support is deprecated in docs/about/build-platforms.rst and deprecated.rst * update our Download page to remove mention of 32-bit Windows Any objections? thanks -- PMM
