The QEMU emulator already deprecated 32-bit host CPU support while for the QEMU 11.0 release this year they could eliminate the 32-bit host support for good.
Richard Henderson sent out a set of 50 patches on Thursday to go ahead and remove the 32-bit host support. He argued the more than seven thousand lines of code savings in QEMU and the Tiny Code Generator (TCG) and is worthwhile especially with the 32-bit support already having been deprecated. He commented on the patch series:
“Long has it been threatened, but here we are at last.
32-bit host support was deprecated with the 10.0 release, and so with the 11.0 release we may remove it. Phil already did some cleanup in 10.2, removing support for mips32 and ppc32 within tcg.
With a net -7302 in the diffstat, I think the motivations are clear, even if half of that was tcg/arm/.”
We’ll see if the 32-bit host CPU support removal finally happens for QEMU 11.0. This change is only about the 32-bit host support and not the guest support.
QEMU 11.0 began development at the end of December and will continue in feature development through March. Following several release candidates, QEMU 11.0 stable should be out sometime in April.
