[v3,1/6] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit x86 hosts

Commit Message

Thomas Huth March 3, 2023, 10:14 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 | 12 ++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)

Patch

diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
index 15084f7bea..f0c1e6b545 100644
--- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
@@ -196,6 +196,18 @@  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 (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
+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
 ----------------------