Old Stuff

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Wall, Stephen" <stephen.wall at redcom.com> writes:

>> From: owner-freebsd-security at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
>> security at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Aaron C. de Bruyn via freebsd-
>> security
>> Subject: Re: Old Stuff
>> 
>>On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 9:58 AM Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I wonder if FreeBSD should drop support for 32bit? Clean out and remove all
>>> of it. It should make the code base easier to maintain, cleaner, and safer.
>>>
>>> In this same vein, let's deprecate and remove things like telnet and ftp.
>>
>> Why remove telnet and FTP?
>
> Why not?  It's not difficult to install ftp as needed from the ports
> tree - there are a number of clients and servers available there,
> including a newer version of tnftp, which is what appears in freebsd
> base.  I can't imagine it would be very difficult to migrate the base
> telnet to ports, either.  It'd be a bit less cruft in the base system
> that has to be maintained.  That applies to tftp as well.
>
> Unless the base system is actually using any of them.  I don't know that.

If I recall correctly, the base has knobs for not building them, so it
must work okay without them. I think there would be some complaints if
they were moved to ports, but not many.

>> From: owner-freebsd-security at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
>> security at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Igor Mozolevsky
>> Subject: Re: Old Stuff
>> 
>> On Wednesday, 24 July 2019, Robert Simmons wrote:
>> > I wonder if FreeBSD should drop support for 32bit? Clean out and remove all
>> > of it. It should make the code base easier to maintain, cleaner, and safer.
>> 
>> Because nobody has a 32bit computer nowadays??? Similarly, you got any
>> empirical evidence to back up the "... safer" part of your speculation?
>
> I have to agree with Igor here - there are still 32-bit SOCs out there
> intended for embedded use. It's likely there are commercial users of
> FreeBSD developing for those platforms.

Quite a few, in fact. Ditching 32-bit is not a practical idea.