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

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:47:02AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jan 2023 at 11:44, Thomas Huth <thuth at redhat.com> 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
> 
> True for x86, not necessarily true for other architectures.
> Are you proposing to deprecate x86 32-bit, or all 32-bit?
> I'm not entirely sure about whether we're yet at a point where
> I'd want to deprecate-and-drop 32-bit arm host support.

Do we have a feeling on which aspects of 32-bit cause us the support
burden ? The boring stuff like compiler errors from mismatched integer
sizes is mostly quick & easy to detect simply through a cross compile.

I vaguely recall someone mentioned problems with atomic ops in the past,
or was it 128-bit ints, caused implications for the codebase ?

With regards,
Daniel
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