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

On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 1:47 AM John Baldwin wrote:
> 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.

I always think in terms of "Zombie Apocalypse"^TM on what to get
myself into.. if its not going to work in that kind of situation then
its not worth the time :-) :-)

Will "lack of support" mean no binaries provided or removal of the
source code so FreeBSD is non-existent anymore on those platforms?

-- 
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info