Re: Future of 32-bit platforms (including i386)

On May 31, 2023, at 10:30, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:09 AM Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_bidouilliste.com> wrote on
> Date: Wed, 24 May 2023 06:35:55 UTC :
> 
> > . . .
> > 
> > I personnaly see armv7 in "degraded maintainance mode" since 13.0,
> > nothing really intersting was added, no new SoC support even if there
> > was some interesting one that we could support, no new drivers for
> > supported platforms. We even lost TI BeagleBone support because no one
> > really have the time to keep support up to date.
> > I still have some little cute boards that I want to use from time to
> > time but the lack of proper porting of new language (like rust and iirc
> > go have problems too) is making new software unusable on those boards
> > (you can't even make some "smart speaker" for spotify as all the
> > spotify clients are in rust).
> > IMX6 support is stalled since ian@ passed away and mmel@ isn't very
> > active atm and they were both the most actives developers for armv7 low
> > level code.
> 
> One of the things for tier 2 is:
> (from https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#archs
> 21.4. Tier 2 section)
> 
> QUOTE
> Collectively, developers are required to provide the following
> to maintain the Tier 2 status of a platform:
> 
>     • Tier 2 architectures must have an active ecosystem of users and developers.
> END QUOTE
> 
> Is there an implication that, even for 14, the "developers"
> part of that for armv7 has dropped off to the point that
> tier 2 would reasonably be in question?
> 
> For the 14 branch, armv7 seems to be right on the edge. Some
> bugs do get fixed, but some of the SoCs are so poorly maintained
> that they don't work anymore (for whatever reason). So "degraded
> maintenance mode" is likely apt for 14: it will still work, mostly, but
> many cool new things that people want, both in terms of languages
> and new hardware support will be lacking in some way, shape or
> form. Tier 2 is likely still the best tier to keep it at, imho. 
> 

One thing I was unsure of is how much the choice is driven
by things as they are at around releng/14.0 vs. what things
might be expected to be like around, say, releng/14.4 (a
number of years later). It appears that changing tier status
is normally avoided for the likes of 14.[1-4] .

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com