Aside from not supporting KVM on 32-bit hosts, the qemu-system-x86_64 binary is a proper superset of the qemu-system-i386 binary. And with the 32-bit x86 host support being deprecated now, it is possible to deprecate the qemu-system-i386 binary now, too.
With regards to 32-bit KVM support in the x86 Linux kernel, the developers confirmed that they do not need a recent qemu-system-i386 binary here: https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/y%2ffkts5ajfy0h...@google.com/ Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> --- docs/about/deprecated.rst | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst index 1ca9dc33d6..c205816c7d 100644 --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst @@ -34,6 +34,22 @@ deprecating the build option and no longer defend it in CI. The ``--enable-gcov`` build option remains for analysis test case coverage. +``qemu-system-i386`` binary (since 8.1) +''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' + +The ``qemu-system-i386`` binary was mainly useful for running with KVM +on 32-bit x86 hosts, but most Linux distributions already removed their +support for 32-bit x86 kernels, so hardly anybody still needs this. The +``qemu-system-x86_64`` binary is a proper superset and can be used to +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. If a 32-bit CPU guest +environment should be enforced, you can switch off the "long mode" CPU +flag with ``-cpu max,lm=off``, or rename/symlink ``qemu-system-x86_64`` +to ``qemu-system-i386`` -- QEMU will then run with the 64-bit extensions +disabled. + + System emulator command line arguments -------------------------------------- -- 2.31.1