Re: Future of armv7

On 14 Nov 2025, at 18:09, John Baldwin wrote:
> Two and a half years ago when we first began talking about deprecating
> 32-bit architectures in 15.0, we decided to keep armv7 for at least
> the stable/15 branch but did not commit to anything beyond that.  Now
> that 15.0 is close to shipping and we are turning our development
> focus to 16.0, we should figure out what we want to say about armv7
> for 16.x in the 15.0 release notes so that users have suitable notice.
>
> In particular, do we want to deprecate armv7 in 16.0 (similar to the
> state of 32-bit powerpc in 15.0), or do we want to keep it?
>
> My initial suggestion is that we announce that we plan to deprecate it
> in 16.0.  In that case, I would also suggest that we follow a similar
> process of keeping armv7 for most of the lifetime of 16.0 so that we
> can reneg if need be during the 16.0 cycle.
>
> What do other folks think?
>
For what it’s worth, from the pfsense/Netgate perspective: we have one hardware platform based on armv7 which has been end-of-life for two years already. We still release software for it, but do not guarantee anything.

It’s starting to become quite clear that armv7 doesn’t have a significant developer base any more, and we’ve resorted to turning off features (e.g. no suricata on 3100 because rust doesn’t build for armv7), and as far as I can see that’s only going to keep getting worse.

pf has a counter hack in it to improve performance on armv7 that I’d also love to tear out.

I understand the desire to keep platforms around, but there’s a real cost to it, often borne by an invisible selection of developers (and users, who report bugs into dead space).

I’d argue that unless at least a few people want to step up and start doing maintenance work it has to go.

—
Kristof