On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 at 12:56, Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> wrote: > Right, I think we should also work more towards consolidating the QEMU > binaries, to avoid that we have to always build sooo many target binaries > again and again. E.g.: > > - Do we still need to support 32-bit hosts? If not we could > finally get rid of qemu-system-i386, qemu-system-ppc, > qemu-system-arm, etc. and just provide the 64-bit variants
We could drop qemu-system-i386 &c without dropping 32-bit host support (except for the special case of wanting to use KVM): 32-bit host TCG happily runs the qemu-system-foo64 binary. This does depend on the target arch having been set up so that the 64-bit version works exactly like the 32-bit one for 32-bit guest boards, though -- arm does this. I think x86 mostly does except for differences like the default guest CPU type. riscv used to have a "32 bit cpus only in the qemu-system-foo64 binary" setup but I think that is either fixed or being fixed. There's also the issue that it breaks existing working user commandlines, of course. > - Could we maybe somehow unify the targets that have both, big > and little endian versions? Then we could merge e.g. > qemu-system-microblaze and qemu-system-microblazeel etc. > > - Or could we maybe even build a unified qemu-system binary that > contains all target CPUs? ... that would also allow e.g. > machines with a x86 main CPU and an ARM-based board management > controller... I would like to see this one day, but it's a pretty non-trivial amount of engineering work to identify all the places where we currently hard-code a compile-time setting about the target architecture and make them runtime instead (in a way that doesn't torpedo performance). "is the target CPU big-endian" is one of those... > Also I wonder whether we could maybe even get rid of the capstone and slirp > submodules in QEMU now ... these libraries should be available in the most > distros by now, and otherwise people could also install them manually instead? I suspect that's rather overoptimistic, but how widely available they are is a question of fact that we can check. thanks -- PMM
