On 06/27/2018 06:09 AM, Thomas Huth wrote: > On 27.06.2018 10:52, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: >> Hi, >> >>>> Is QEMU still useful on 32-bit hosts? Honest question! >>> >>> I guess it depends on what 32-bit hosts you consider. If you look at only >>> x86 vs. x86_64 then probably x86 is not that important any more but for some >>> embedded systems/SoCs 32bit might still be common and QEMU useful for those >>> (also as host not only emulated). >> >> Well. I've used kvm with an 32bit arm soc (cubietruck). It's very >> slow. And all the arm architecture improvements to support kvm better >> are for aarch64 only. >> >>> Another option might be to not support audio/hda on 32bit hosts. It's not >>> nice either but a lot nicer than dropping support for 32bit hosts >>> alltogether to fix a problem in device emulation. >> >> But it also is not useful and a waste of resources to maintain 32bit >> host compatibility if nobody actually uses that ... >> >> For me testbuilds are the only reason to compile qemu for 32bit hosts. >> Since years. > > Well, while that's true for you, me and likely most of us developers, > you can not know whether this is also true for all users of qemu. Thus > this needs to be announced first for a couple of releases so that people > have a chance to speak up whether they still need this or not. As > mentioned earlier, embedded devices are often still 32-bit and I know > that there really are people who use QEMU on embedded devices. > > But I think we could at least announce now already that we intend to > drop support for 32-bit hosts in the future (maybe not in 2 releases > already, but, let's say in 2020? 2020 is already the EOL of Python 2, so > that will rule out a bunch of other legacy hosts, too).
linux-user is certainly widely used on ARMv6 / ARMv7. Known user cases: - run ARMv7 binaries on ARMv6 - run armhf binaries on armel - run x86-64 binaries on ARMv7
