Re: Future of armv7

On Fri, 14 Nov 2025 at 09:09, John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> 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?
>

There still seems like there's plenty of users of armv7 hardware out there.

Outside of the raspberry pi ecosystem where people are still using the armv7
cores, and some of the armv7 qualcomm parts i do armv7 testing on,
what's being made?

It'd be a shame to EOL it IMHO.


-adrian