Re: Future of armv7

I don’t think this made it out onto the list because I emailed from a non subscribed address but I wrote this last night

> On Nov 14, 2025, at 9:09 AM, 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?
> 
> -- 
> John Baldwin
> 


I don’t think this made it out onto the list because I emailed from a non subscribed address so I’m sending it again, but I wrote this last night:

Hi John,
	We’ve corresponded so you probably know of me but for those that may be reading this that don’t, my name is Christopher Bowman.  For the last year or 18 months, I’ve been writing a column in the FreeBSD Journal revolving around the AMD/Xilinx Zynq chips which are based on the Arm Cortex A9.  I find that FreeBSD works shockingly well on these chip and I’ve tried to evangelize and promote them and FreeBSD as much as I can.  These chips are a bit unique as an embedded platform as they are not just a pair of A9s but they also have considerable FGPA fabric attached directly to the processor via the AXI bus.  The work that I do isn’t be easily moved to any other FreeBSD platform as I’m not aware of any other FPGA/processor combo in this price range that is supported by FreeBSD.  There are other processor/FPGA chips out there but I don’t think any work with FreeBSD and certainly none I know of are in this price range.  If you abandon this architecture, I’ll probably continue working with these chips but eventually I’ll just give up.  Perhaps I’ll move to Linux.  It’s hard to imagine I’ll keep writing the column.  It wouldn’t seem right to encourage people to purchase a board and invest time to experiment with a dead end area.
	I’m not saying that my contribution is particularly valuable.  Heck, I’m not even sure more than 4 people read my articles.  I’m not sure anyone else is using this platform (or any of the other boards based on the same chip which should also work).  But it’s a valuable platform to me.  Having said, I realize, that I don’t really contribute to the code base.  The effort to maintain this isn’t born by me.  Perhaps, for this reason, my two cents isn’t as valuable as some others.  Still it’s valuable to me, and I hope we continue to support it.
Best Regards,
Christopher