On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, Thomas Huth wrote:
On 03/03/2025 18.32, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 3/3/25 17:57, Peter Maydell wrote:
On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 at 15:49, Cédric Le Goater <c...@redhat.com> wrote:
Why are we keeping qemu-system-ppc and qemu-system-i386, and arm,
since qemu-system-ppc64 and qemu-system-x86_64 should be able to
run the same machines ?
They're not identical -- for example "-cpu max" on
qemu-system-arm is a 32-bit CPU but on qemu-system-aarch64
it is a 64-bit CPU.
There's definitely a lot of overlap but we can't just drop
the -arm executable until/unless we figure out what to do
about the corner cases where they are different. Plus there's
a lot of users out there with existing command lines and
configs that assume the existence of a qemu-system-arm
executable.
Thomas and myself have been trying to sort that out. Now with the
single-binary effort, it gained new interest. This hasn't be a trivial
task so far, due to as you mentioned the legacy CLI uses and migration.
FWIW, here's my former attempt to see whether we could move into that
direction:
https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20230425133851.489283-1-th...@redhat.com/
This mentions KVM compatibility. KVM now works at least on PowerPC G4 host
with qemu-system-ppc (as I've heard, did not try it myself). Would that
stop working with qemu-system-ppc64? As people still use old 32bit PPC
OSes such as MacOS with qemu it's still wanted to keep it working.
(Although most people use TCG on other hosts and maybe a few on actual PPC
host but it's still nice to keep this feature until such hosts still
exist.)
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
In the end, it was too frustrating to struggle with the
backwards-compatibility questions (do we really need to keep qemu-system-i386
around forever?), so I pretty much gave up on that patch series.
