[RFC PATCH] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit host systems

[Claudio Fontana]

On 1/30/23 12:44, Thomas Huth wrote:
> Testing 32-bit host OS support takes a lot of precious time during the QEMU
> contiguous integration tests, and considering that many OS vendors stopped
> shipping 32-bit variants of their OS distributions and most hardware from
> the past >10 years is capable of 64-bit, keeping the 32-bit support alive
> is an inadequate burden for the QEMU project. Let's mark the 32-bit
> support as deprecated so we can drop it after a while - this will help
> us to cut down our limited CI minutes in the gitlab CI, for example.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth at redhat.com>
> ---
>  docs/about/deprecated.rst | 13 ++++++++++++-
>  1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> index 9f1bbc495d..ce6463e72b 100644
> --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
> @@ -181,9 +181,20 @@ As Debian 10 ("Buster") moved into LTS the big endian 32 bit version of
>  MIPS moved out of support making it hard to maintain our
>  cross-compilation CI tests of the architecture. As we no longer have
>  CI coverage support may bitrot away before the deprecation process
> -completes. The little endian variants of MIPS (both 32 and 64 bit) are
> +completes. The little endian variants of MIPS are
>  still a supported host architecture.
>  
> +32-bit host operating systems (since 8.0)
> +'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
> +
> +Testing 32-bit host OS support takes a lot of precious time during the QEMU
> +contiguous integration tests, and considering that many OS vendors stopped
> +shipping 32-bit variants of their OS distributions and most hardware from
> +the past >10 years is capable of 64-bit, keeping the 32-bit support alive
> +is an inadequate burden for the QEMU project. Thus QEMU will soon drop the
> +support for 32-bit host systems.
> +
> +
>  QEMU API (QAPI) events
>  ----------------------
>  

>From our (SUSE) support perspective, we do not support 32bit virtualization hosts downstream,

and in general I am in favor of the change.

Ciao,

Claudio