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

On Tue, 23 May 2023 16:46:51 -0700
John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> 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 personnaly see armv7 in "degraded maintainance mode" since 13.0,
nothing really intersting was added, no new SoC support even if there
was some interesting one that we could support, no new drivers for
supported platforms. We even lost TI BeagleBone support because no one
really have the time to keep support up to date.
 I still have some little cute boards that I want to use from time to
time but the lack of proper porting of new language (like rust and iirc
go have problems too) is making new software unusable on those boards
(you can't even make some "smart speaker" for spotify as all the
spotify clients are in rust).
 IMX6 support is stalled since ian@ passed away and mmel@ isn't very
active atm and they were both the most actives developers for armv7 low
level code.

 So I'm really interested in who wants to keep armv7 and why, is it
just "I'm using my RPI2 and wants to continue using it" ?

 Cheers,

-- 
Emmanuel Vadot <manu@bidouilliste.com> <manu@freebsd.org>