Re: [PATCH 1/9] tests: update Debian images to Bookworm

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 12:53:30PM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> On 15/9/23 11:24, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 11:14:29AM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> > > On 14/9/23 17:54, Alex Bennée wrote:
> > > > Bookworm has been out a while now. Time to update our containers to
> > > > the current stable. This requires the latest lcitool repo so update
> > > > the sub-module too.
> > > > 
> > > > For some reason the MIPs containers won't build so skip those for now.
> > > 
> > > Debian removed mipsel:
> > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/09/msg00000.html
> > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2019/08/msg00582.html ...
> > 
> > Wwith our general aim to support latest release, plus the previous
> > release (capped to a maximum of 2 years), we can still consider
> > mipsel supportable in QEMU CI by sticking with oldstable (Bullseye)
> > for the mipsel containers.
> > 
> > Once Debian 13 comes out, however, we'll be discarding Bullseye
> > from CI and so we'll be unable to do CI for mipsel. At the very
> > least this means we'll consider mipsel to be downgraded in terms
> > of supportability when that happens. We might then consider
> > explicitly dropping it as a buld target entirely, as the writing
> > is on the wall for 32-bit OS platforms in general...
> 
> I'm fine with dropping system emulation on 32-bit hosts, but a bit
> reluctant to drop user emulation there. Anyhow I agree with our
> distrib releases support rules, so the mipsel buildsys part is
> effectively condemned.

I wouldn't say condemned, because we are free to continue including
mipsel code in QEMU if we desire - we just will be unable to
guarantee that it works correctly - we'd be relying on developers
and users to report bugs and test it on whatever distro thye happen
to still have working.  Cutting it back to just user emulation is
a reasonable thing - testing user mode guest is not locked into
our support matrix, so we can easily test user mode binaries via
ancient distros if desired.

With regards,
Daniel
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