They could probably kill support and power for some of the "dead silicon" platforms they support. If the CPU hasn't been manufactured in the last decade or two, why support it?
"On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.
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"Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.
Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them."
They absolutely do not support the architectures in the same way. Most NetBSD ports are cross compiled and not tested, you are lucky if they boot before hard locking.
OpenBSD has a strict policy that supported architectures must be self hosted, tested, and built against HEAD constantly.
There's also bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD on not so friendly terms. OpenBSD lost a number of developers when that happened. They don't appear to currently support 88K, and aim to target current architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it'd be worth their while to support another architecture to accommodate a developer who would do all the work to maintain that platform, as well as contribute in other areas.
I believe that the Foundation does not have a lot of hardware, volunteers own and support them. As of a few years back there is a "tier" system for NetBSD support too, http://www.netbsd.org/ports/#tiers which means that it is up to eg the Vax maintainers to keep things working rather than everyone.
Keep in mind that OpenBSD is by the developers for the developers. That it's also useful for a lot of users is just a nice side effect, helpful for testing and funding.
At home when things get though, we cut costs and hope for better times.
If OpenBSD isn't exaggerating about shutting down the project, then it seems reasonable to review their policy regarding old platforms and focus on what gives the most return.
I think Theo answered that question more than once. The different platforms reveal different kind of bugs, but having the platforms around also keeps developers around.
I am happy to see continued support for "dead silicon" as it provides a (possibly) non-compromised platform. It's also nice to have obscure attack surface available if one required it.
Did you see any leaked powerpoint slides discussing MIPS r12k vulns, created in conjunction with SGI ? I didn't ...
They should probably try to define some sort of support schedule. The current setup of "let's support everything under the sun from the last 10 years" is unsustainable, but they seem to want to continue with that.
"On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. "
"Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.
Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them."