Re: Future of armv7

I'm voting for removal as while it still works, it is not future proof
as a target for a general-purpose OS for many reasons:
- most developers today think in 64-bit terms by default
- toolchains and libraries increasingly assume 64-bit
- no major vendor support
- armv7 is a legacy ISA (effectively)
- all phones on earth are 64 bit
- modern OS features are fundamentally 64-bit
- testing new features on 32 bit not happening
Developers should be focusing on arm64/amd64 and riscv64 instead.
Older hardware don't stop working, it can happily use older releases
of FreeBSD, just no major updates.

Older Hardware -> Older FreeBSD !

Ruslan

On Fri Nov 14, 2025 at 5:09 PM UTC, 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?