linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: disable on 32-bit unless CONFIG

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Date:   Wed, 22 Feb 2023 14:27:19 -0800
From:   Sean Christopherson <seanjc@...gle.com>
To:     Thomas Huth <thuth@...hat.com>
Cc:     Maxim Levitsky <mlevitsk@...hat.com>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
        "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: disable on 32-bit unless CONFIG_BROKEN

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023, Thomas Huth wrote:
> On 29/09/2022 15.52, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
> > On Thu, 2022-09-29 at 15:26 +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > > On 9/28/22 19:55, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > > > As far as my opinion goes I do volunteer to test this code more often,
> > > > > and I do not want to see the 32 bit KVM support be removed*yet*.
> > > > 
> > > > Yeah, I 100% agree that it shouldn't be removed until we have equivalent test
> > > > coverage.  But I do think it should an "off-by-default" sort of thing.  Maybe
> > > > BROKEN is the wrong dependency though?  E.g. would EXPERT be a better option?
> > > 
> > > Yeah, maybe EXPERT is better but I'm not sure of the equivalent test
> > > coverage.  32-bit VMX/SVM kvm-unit-tests are surely a good idea, but
> > > what's wrong with booting an older guest?
> > 
> > > From my point of view, using the same kernel source for host and the guest
> > is easier because you know that both kernels behave the same.
> > 
> > About EXPERT, IMHO these days most distros already dropped 32 bit suport thus anyway
> > one needs to compile a recent 32 bit kernel manually - thus IMHO whoever
> > these days compiles a 32 bit kernel, knows what they are doing.
> > 
> > I personally would wait few more releases when there is a pressing reason to remove
> > this support.
> 
> FWIW, from the QEMU perspective, it would be very helpful to remove 32-bit
> KVM support from the kernel. The QEMU project currently struggles badly with
> keeping everything tested in the CI in a reasonable amount of time. The
> 32-bit KVM kernel support is the only reason to keep the qemu-system-i386
> binary around - everything else can be covered with the qemu-system-x86_64
> binary that is a superset of the -i386 variant (except for the KVM part as
> far as I know).
> Sure, we could also drop qemu-system-i386 from the CI without dropping the
> 32-bit KVM code in the kernel, but I guess things will rather bitrot there
> even faster in that case, so I'd appreciate if the kernel could drop the
> 32-bit in the near future, too.

Ya, I would happily drop support for 32-bit kernels today, the only sticking point
is the lack of 32-bit shadow paging test coverage, which unfortunately is a rather
large point.  :-(