Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 17 Feb 2023 20:36:41 +0100 | From | Thomas Huth <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: disable on 32-bit unless CONFIG_BROKEN |
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On 29/09/2022 15.52, Maxim Levitsky wrote: > On Thu, 2022-09-29 at 15:26 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote: >> On 9/28/22 19:55, Sean Christopherson wrote: >>>> As far as my opinion goes I do volunteer to test this code more often, >>>> and I do not want to see the 32 bit KVM support be removed*yet*. >>> >>> Yeah, I 100% agree that it shouldn't be removed until we have equivalent test >>> coverage. But I do think it should an "off-by-default" sort of thing. Maybe >>> BROKEN is the wrong dependency though? E.g. would EXPERT be a better option? >> >> Yeah, maybe EXPERT is better but I'm not sure of the equivalent test >> coverage. 32-bit VMX/SVM kvm-unit-tests are surely a good idea, but >> what's wrong with booting an older guest? > >>From my point of view, using the same kernel source for host and the guest > is easier because you know that both kernels behave the same. > > About EXPERT, IMHO these days most distros already dropped 32 bit suport thus anyway > one needs to compile a recent 32 bit kernel manually - thus IMHO whoever > these days compiles a 32 bit kernel, knows what they are doing. > > I personally would wait few more releases when there is a pressing reason to remove > this support.
FWIW, from the QEMU perspective, it would be very helpful to remove 32-bit KVM support from the kernel. The QEMU project currently struggles badly with keeping everything tested in the CI in a reasonable amount of time. The 32-bit KVM kernel support is the only reason to keep the qemu-system-i386 binary around - everything else can be covered with the qemu-system-x86_64 binary that is a superset of the -i386 variant (except for the KVM part as far as I know). Sure, we could also drop qemu-system-i386 from the CI without dropping the 32-bit KVM code in the kernel, but I guess things will rather bitrot there even faster in that case, so I'd appreciate if the kernel could drop the 32-bit in the near future, too.
Thomas
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