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Re: [PATCH v2 4/6] docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate the qemu-system-arm binary



On 02/03/2023 23.16, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 2/3/23 17:31, Thomas Huth wrote:
qemu-system-aarch64 is a proper superset of qemu-system-arm,
and the latter was mainly still required for 32-bit KVM support.
But this 32-bit KVM arm support has been dropped in the Linux
kernel a couple of years ago already, so we don't really need
qemu-system-arm anymore, thus deprecated it now.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
  docs/about/deprecated.rst | 10 ++++++++++
  1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)

diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
index a30aa8dfdf..21ce70b5c9 100644
--- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
@@ -45,6 +45,16 @@ run 32-bit guests by selecting a 32-bit CPU model, including KVM support
  on x86_64 hosts. Thus users are recommended to reconfigure their systems
  to use the ``qemu-system-x86_64`` binary instead.
+``qemu-system-arm`` binary (since 8.0)
+''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
+
+``qemu-system-aarch64`` is a proper superset of ``qemu-system-arm``. The
+latter was mainly a requirement for running KVM on 32-bit arm hosts, but
+this 32-bit KVM support has been removed some years ago already (see:

s/some/few/?

I can also use "three years ago" since the patch had been merged in March 2020.

+https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=541ad0150ca4
+). Thus the QEMU project will drop the ``qemu-system-arm`` binary in a
+future release. Use ``qemu-system-aarch64`` instead.

If we unify, wouldn't it be simpler to name the single qemu-system
binary emulating various ARM architectures as 'qemu-system-arm'?

That would be more intuitive for people who are completely new to QEMU, but I guess it will cause a lot of "you broke my script that uses the -aarch64 binary" troubles again. So I think it's likely better to not go down that road.

 Thomas




 


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