Re: Future of armv7

On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 12:09:07PM -0500, 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?

I dunno, but ultimately it's up to devs at the time.
They don't have to give a reason: it's their choice what arch they
support. But: given all that, to hypothesise for a moment...

How many users and potential users does FreeBSD want to drop?
What does armv7 support "cost" ? what devs can work on it?
difficult to measure accurately any of these apart from maybe the
last one.

armv7 stuff is still being made
https://www.armbasedsolutions.com/info-detail/armv7-a-armv7-r-and-armv7-m-architectures the target market appears to have changed to mainly
industrial applications, (mostly?) to my non-expert eye.
So, if freebsd drops armv7 support then this hardware becomes 
unavailable for those who want to use freebsd on it.

armv7 hardware, at least the stuff I've seen (and that's mainly rpi stuff)
seems partucularly durable. There will be a potential need for freebsd
for these boards for as long as there are freebsd users who have these 
boards and they were (still are) very popular and there are a lot of 
them still about. Dropping armv7 support will drop these users too.

There are replacement OSes available. If one still wants a BSD there 
is always NetBSD which ISTR has even armv6 support. Then there's
Alpine and even raspios who also offer armv6 as well as v7.

I'd hope that armv7 support in FreeBSD support continues simply
for the selfish reason that I'm most familiar with (out of all the 
mentioned OSes) with FreeBSD. But I realise it's a selfish reason.

I'd prefer that if FreeBSD is going to drop support for it that (they) 
make a firm commitment/announcement to do just that by 
$date or $release so that people like me can plan. I'm unsure
of the value of "depreciation" tbh. It's wooly. Either expect it to work 
or not.
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