[akoster]

From the release notes, it appears this may be the last release with i386 / 32-bit Intel x86 (as well as 32-bit armv6 and PowerPC) support.

“FreeBSD 15.0 is not expected to include support for 32-bit platforms other than armv7. The armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms are deprecated and will be removed. 64-bit systems will still be able to run older 32-bit binaries.“

Source: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

[cperciva]

Probably 14.3 will be the last release with i386. But yes, 14.x will be the last major branch with i386.

[csdreamer7]

Surprised that armv7 will be getting 32bit support but not x86. I know arm is huge, but it's platform support is also fragmented compared to an x86 box. Can anyone share some more info on this?

Also surprised they are cutting Power. That is one of the 4 platforms RHEL supports.

[dragontamer]

There's an industrial computer chip using ARM9 (aka: ARMv5 !!!!), let alone ARMv7.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/sam9x60

This was released in the year 2020, for example, the latest Atmel SAM Microprocessor. While ARM9 / ARMv5 is abnormally out-of-date (lol Nintendo DS was ARMv6), its still getting new chips even today.

ARMv7, consisting of Cortex-A5, A7, and similar chips, is also similarly widespread today. I don't know how much FreeBSD support there is but I can think of multiple chips that have been made in the past 5 years that are still 32-bit ARMv7.

In an embedded world that still buys 8-bit computers, 32-bit is a luxury and 64-bit is just too much.

----------

I'm only familiar with these chips from a Linux perspective however. But I have to imagine that some FreeBSD fanboi is hard at work porting FreeBSD to them!

EDIT: Lets see.... https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/arm/

Oh snap, Xilinx Zynq7 family. Yeah, that will do it. That's an extremely common chip (FPGA + ARMv7 / Cortex-A9).

[laxd]

> ... some FreeBSD fanboi is hard at work porting ...

Or developers.

[dragontamer]

> Also surprised they are cutting Power. That is one of the 4 platforms RHEL supports.

They're cutting 32-bit Powerpc. It looks like powerpc64le support remains in FreeBSD14.

[cperciva]

Aside from 32-bit arm being used in more small embedded systems, I think it has 64-bit time_t. One of the reasons for killing of i386 is the Y2038 issue.

[csdreamer7]

Ah, makes sense. That is a real issue for Linux and how distros will handle that. Besides cutting 32 bit userland support.

[extraduder_ire]

Hasn't 32bit linux used 64 bit time for a while now? Or at least had it available.

[csdreamer7]

Kinda, apps need to be ported to it, or your C library needs to be sneaky about it.

https://lwn.net/Articles/757042/

If anyone has a newer article, feel free to share.

[cperciva]

Yeah, we considered following Linux's lead by creating a new "i386 with 64-bit time_t" ABI but frankly nobody was interested in doing a lot of work for probably very little benefit.

[packetlost]

I have 2 ARMv7 boards sitting on my desk. They're still extremely common in industry.

[dragontamer]

Which ones? ... If you don't mind me asking? At least the microprocessor if you can't tell me the board :-)

[packetlost]

I'm cheating a bit because it's 2 of the same board, they're Zynq 7010s

[dragontamer]

I wouldn't be surprised if the Zynq is the most common ARMv7 in practice...