[v4,1/5] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit x86 hosts for system emulation

Commit Message

Thomas Huth March 6, 2023, 8:46 a.m. UTC

Hardly anybody still uses 32-bit x86 hosts today, so we should start
deprecating them to stop wasting our time and CI minutes here.
For example, there are also still some unresolved problems with these:
When emulating 64-bit binaries in user mode, TCG does not honor atomicity
for 64-bit accesses, which is "perhaps worse than not working at all"
(quoting Richard). Let's simply make it clear that people should use
64-bit x86 hosts nowadays and we do not intend to fix/maintain the old
32-bit stuff.

Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <[e-mail]>
Reviewed-by: Wilfred Mallawa <[e-mail]>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <[e-mail]>
---
 docs/about/deprecated.rst | 11 +++++++++++
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)

Patch

diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
index 15084f7bea..1ca9dc33d6 100644
--- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
@@ -196,6 +196,17 @@  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.
 
+System emulation on 32-bit x86 hosts (since 8.0)
+''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
+
+Support for 32-bit x86 host deployments is increasingly uncommon in mainstream
+OS distributions given the widespread availability of 64-bit x86 hardware.
+The QEMU project no longer considers 32-bit x86 support for system emulation to
+be an effective use of its limited resources, and thus intends to discontinue
+it. Since all recent x86 hardware from the past >10 years is capable of the
+64-bit x86 extensions, a corresponding 64-bit OS should be used instead.
+
+
 QEMU API (QAPI) events
 ----------------------