Re: [PATCH] KVM: x86: disable on 32-bit unless CONFIG_BROKEN

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Wed Sep 28 2022 - 05:57:12 EST


On 9/28/22 09:10, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
I also think that outside KVM developers nobody should be using KVM on 32 bit host.

However for_developement_ I think that 32 bit KVM support is very useful, as it
allows to smoke test the support for 32 bit nested hypervisors, which I do once in a while,
and can even probably be useful to some users (e.g running some legacy stuff in a VM,
which includes a hypervisor, especially to run really legacy OSes / custom bare metal software,
using an old hypervisor) - or in other words, 32 bit nested KVM is mostly useless, but
other 32 bit nested hypervisors can be useful.

Yes, I can always use an older 32 bit kernel in a guest with KVM support, but as long
as current kernel works, it is useful to use the same kernel on host and guest.

Yeah, I would use older 32 bit kernels just like I use RHEL4 to test PIT reinjection. :) But really the ultimate solution to this would be to improve kvm-unit-tests so that we can compile vmx.c and svm.c for 32-bit.

Paolo