On 14/09/2021 17.22, Richard Henderson wrote:
On 9/14/21 5:26 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
(2) RAM blocks should have a length that fits inside a
signed 32-bit type on 32-bit hosts (at least I assume this
is where the 2047MB limit is coming from; in theory this ought
to be improveable but auditing the code for mishandling of
RAMblock sizes to ensure we weren't accidentally stuffing
their size into a signed 'long' somewhere would be kind
of painful)
Recalling that the win64 abi model is p64, i.e. 'long' is still 32-bit while
pointers are 64-bit, how close do we think we are to this being fixed already?
Even if we did fix (2) we'd need to compromise on (3)
sometimes still -- if a board has 4GB of RAM that's
not going to fit in 32 bits regardless. But we would be
able to let boards with 2GB have 2GB.
I'm not opposed to deprecating 32-bit hosts... ;-)
I think we should consider this again, indeed. Plain 32-bit CPUs are quite
seldom these days, aren't they? And I think we urgently need to decrease the
amount of things that we have to test and maintain in our CI and developer
branches... So is there still a really really compelling reason to keep
32-bit host support alive?
Could we maybe also decrease the amount of targets, i.e. merge
qemu-system-x86_64 and qemu-system-i386, merge qemu-system-ppc64 and
qemu-system-ppc, etc. where it makes sense (i.e. where one of the binaries
is a superset of the other)?
Thomas
