FreeBSD distribution for ARM processors.

[John W. Kitz]

Gilbert,

Thanks. Do you expect this current position to change in the near future?

The reason I'm asking is the fact that I get the impression that there may
be developments in the area of hardware development such as the cubietruck
(see
http://cubieboard.org/2013/09/14/cubietruck-is-put-into-trial-production/)
which move ARM based systems closer to general purpose platforms based on
architectures such as i386, AMD, SPARC, etc. and which might warrant such a
change provided that it is feasible from a perspective of distribution
packaging of course.

Regards, Jk.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lowell Gilbert [mailto:freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org] 
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2013 3:24 PM
To: John.Kitz at xs4all.nl
Cc: freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD distribution for ARM processors.

"John W. Kitz" <John.Kitz at xs4all.nl> writes:

> Can someone please explain the rationale behind not providing a 
> distribution for arm based systems, as it seems somewhat illogical to 
> me that distributions are available for ia64, powerpc, sparc64 (see
> http://www.freebsd.org/where.html) which are considered Tier 2 
> architectures while the official reason for arm being a Tier 2 
> architecture is the fact that no distribution is provided for it (see 
> http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm.html).

The ARM port is mostly used for embedded work, for which a formal
distribution would not be helpful. There really aren't many standards for
peripherals beyond i2c, so it wouldn't be possible to support different
ARM-based devices with a single distribution.

Be well.