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

On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:09 AM Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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?
>

For the 14 branch, armv7 seems to be right on the edge. Some
bugs do get fixed, but some of the SoCs are so poorly maintained
that they don't work anymore (for whatever reason). So "degraded
maintenance mode" is likely apt for 14: it will still work, mostly, but
many cool new things that people want, both in terms of languages
and new hardware support will be lacking in some way, shape or
form. Tier 2 is likely still the best tier to keep it at, imho.

Warner