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

On 4/27/23 10:19 AM, John Baldwin wrote:
> For 13.0, i386 was demoted from Tier 1 to Tier 2.  In the announcement
> of this for 13.0, the project committed to an update on i386's future
> around the time of 14.0.  The announcement at the time suggested that
> i386 would be supported less in 14.x than in 13.x.
> 
> My proposal is that for 14.x we treat i386 like any other Tier 2
> platform.  That is, release images and packages would only be provided
> on a best-effort basis, and we would not guarantee providing them.  I
> think we should also stop shipping binary updates for the base system
> (freebsd-update) for 14.x for i386.
> 
> 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.  That is, that we may
> remove them outright from the tree, or we may leave them in the tree,
> but we do not plan on building packages or release images.  Another
> option to consider for 32-bit platforms perhaps in 15 is to remove
> kernel support and only retain the ability to build userland.  The
> goal of saying this now-ish (or about the time 14.0 is going to ship)
> would be to give time for users and developers to respond in the
> window between 14.0 and 15.0 so we can evaluate those responses as an
> input into the final decision for 15.

We discussed this topic during the 15.0 developer summit and the consensus
among the folks present (which is only a subset of our community), is
that there is still interest in supporting armv7 kernels in 15.0, but not
kernels for other platforms.  In addition, no one expressed a need for
full 32-bit world support for i386 and powerpc, only for compat32 support
in the kernel, and lib32 (cc -m32) support in userland.

One question for this is if we think we will have sufficient developer
resources to maintain armv7 kernels for the life of stable/15.  We can
largely punt on the final decision for that until close to the release of
15.0.  I think for what we announce for 14.0 we can still say that we
are generally planning to remove 32-bit kernel and world support in 15.0,
but may consider keeping armv7.

-- 
John Baldwin