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

Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_bidouilliste.com> wrote on
Date: Wed, 24 May 2023 06:35:55 UTC :

> . . .
> 
> 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.

One of the things for tier 2 is:
(from https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#archs
21.4. Tier 2 section)

QUOTE
Collectively, developers are required to provide the following
to maintain the Tier 2 status of a platform:

    • Tier 2 architectures must have an active ecosystem of users and developers.
END QUOTE

Is there an implication that, even for 14, the "developers"
part of that for armv7 has dropped off to the point that
tier 2 would reasonably be in question?

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com