Re: Future of 32-bit platforms (including i386)

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 11:32 AM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
wrote:

> --------
> John Baldwin writes:
>
> > A larger question is what to do about 32-bit platforms moving forward.
> > My proposal for powerpc, i386, and armv[67] is that we say publicly
> > that we anticipate not supporting them in 15.
>
> If we do, the first two questions we will get back are:
>
> 1. When does 15 happen ?
>

Late 2025, give or take 6 months would be our recent cadence. while we
might want to change
this cadance, any decision here should likely assume that cadence and we
can make adjustments
to the plan based on a hypothetically changed cadence would bring. So we'd
plan on removing
the 32-bit platforms sometime in 2024 or early 2025 at the latest, but as
soon as the end of this
year. So you'd no longer be able to run 'main' on these platforms after a
year or two.


> 2. How long time will some branch of 14 be supported ?
>

At least until 2027 if history is a guide (de-facto is about 2 years after
the next major branch) with
fading levels of support. I think the 'support model' would place it around
June 2028 somewhere
assuming we release 14 in June. There's clearly some fuzziness here, but
for planning purposes
one should expect updates to trail off in late 2026 or early 2027 and
critical updates stopping
sometime before 2028. At least that's what I'm observing with EOL of 12
that's pending... as
well as what's happened more organically for 10 and 11.

Of course, the above is my opinion, and it's phrased such as to give some
less vague timelines to
John's proposal.

Is this helpful?

Warner


> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>
>