[PATCH 1/2] docs/about: Deprecate 32-bit x86 hosts and qemu-system-i386

[Thomas Huth]

Hardly anybody still uses 32-bit x86 hosts today, so we should
start deprecating them to finally have less test efforts.
With regards to 32-bit KVM support in the x86 Linux kernel,
the developers confirmed that they do not need a recent
qemu-system-i386 binary here:

 https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/Y%2ffkTs5ajFy0hP1U@google.com/

Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth at redhat.com>
---
 docs/about/deprecated.rst | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)

diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
index 15084f7bea..98517f5187 100644
--- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
@@ -196,6 +196,19 @@ CI coverage support may bitrot away before the deprecation process
 completes. The little endian variants of MIPS (both 32 and 64 bit) are
 still a supported host architecture.
 
+32-bit x86 hosts and ``qemu-system-i386`` (since 8.0)
+'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
+
+Testing 32-bit x86 host OS support takes a lot of precious time during the
+QEMU contiguous integration tests, and considering that most OS vendors
+stopped shipping 32-bit variants of their x86 OS distributions and most
+x86 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 x86 host systems and the
+``qemu-system-i386`` binary. Use ``qemu-system-x86_64`` (which is a proper
+superset of ``qemu-system-i386``) on a 64-bit host machine instead.
+
+
 QEMU API (QAPI) events
 ----------------------
 
-- 
2.31.1