On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 10:01, Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On 10/05/2022 10.54, Markus Armbruster wrote: > > Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> writes: > > > > [...] > > > >> I once suggested in the past already that we should maybe get rid of > >> the 32-bit variants in case the 64-bit variant is a full superset, so > >> we can save compile- and test times (which is quite a bit for QEMU), > >> but I've been told that the 32-bit variants are mostly still required > >> for supporting KVM on 32-bit host machines. > > > > Do we still care for 32-bit host machines? > > As long as the Linux kernel still supports 32-bit KVM virtualization, I > think we have to keep the userspace around for that, too. > > But I wonder why we're keeping qemu-system-arm around? 32-bit KVM support > for ARM has been removed with Linux kernel 5.7 as far as I know, so I think > we could likely drop the qemu-system-arm nowadays, too? Peter, Richard, > what's your opinion on this?
Two main reasons, I think: * command-line compatibility (ie there are lots of command lines out there using that binary name) * nobody has yet cared enough to come up with a plan for what we want to do differently for these 32-bit architectures, so the default is "keep doing what we always have" In particular, I don't want to get rid of qemu-system-arm as the *only* 32-bit target binary we drop. Either we stick with what we have or we have a larger plan for sorting this out consistently across target architectures. -- PMM
