Re: [Xen-devel] Future of 32-bit PV support

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2018, Juergen Gross wrote:
> In the Xen x86 community call we have been discussing whether anyone
> really is depending on 32-bit PV guests. We'd like to evaluate whether
> anyone would see problems with:
> 
> - deprecating 32-bit PV guest support in Xen, meaning that we'd
>   eventually switch to support 32-bit PV guests only via PV-shim from
>   Xen 4.12 or 4.13
> 
> - dropping 32-bit PV support from upstream Linux kernel, resulting in
>   current 32-bit PV guests no longer being able to upgrade to the newest
>   kernel version any longer
> 
> And related to that:
> 
> - is there any Linux distribution still shipping 32-bit PV-capable
>   systems?
> 
> - what about BSD? Is 32-bit PV support important there?

Hi Juergen,

Although I can see that deprecating 32-bit PV guest support is
desirable, and it might not cause any problems to Linux and
BSDs, we need to be careful about unikernels.

There are probably unikernels out there that only support PV 32bit
still. And why not? If you are designing a unikernel today, it would
still make sense to use PV 32bit or PVH.

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