docs/about/deprecated: Deprecate 32-bit x86 hosts for system emulation

Hardly anybody still uses 32-bit x86 hosts today, so we should start
deprecating them to stop wasting our time and CI minutes here.

Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Wilfred Mallawa <wilfred.mallawa@wdc.com>
Message-Id: <20230306084658.29709-2-thuth@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>

diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
index 15084f7bea4b8ec65c033aa59734b1a66a1b18a0..1ca9dc33d6122a8bd09306d947c16bc287c7c2f7 100644 (file)
--- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst
@@ -196,6 +196,17 @@ CI coverage support may bitrot away before the deprecation process
 completes. The little endian variants of MIPS (both 32 and 64 bit) are
 still a supported host architecture.
 
+System emulation on 32-bit x86 hosts (since 8.0)
+''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
+
+Support for 32-bit x86 host deployments is increasingly uncommon in mainstream
+OS distributions given the widespread availability of 64-bit x86 hardware.
+The QEMU project no longer considers 32-bit x86 support for system emulation to
+be an effective use of its limited resources, and thus intends to discontinue
+it. Since all recent x86 hardware from the past >10 years is capable of the
+64-bit x86 extensions, a corresponding 64-bit OS should be used instead.
+
+
 QEMU API (QAPI) events
 ----------------------