Re: FreeBSD 14: Poll armv6 deprecated or removed

On Thu, Nov 04, 2021 at 11:53:18AM -0700, Mark Millard via freebsd-arch wrote:

>Without one or more developers willing to keep ARM11 based RPi* FreeBSD
>working as FreeBSD updates, the code will break. Other architectures
>have been removed for such. Folks that do not want to work on such code
>do not want to have to work on it to keep FreeBSD building and operating
>for other architectures that have active developmers/maintainers.
>
>If there were active FreeBSD developers for ARM11 RPi*'s, the removal
>would have been unlikely to be proposed at all, even if the use was
>minor. FreeBSD is driven by the developer context directly, not the
>usage context directly. 

OK. I can understand that. No developers want to work on it so no
interest. That's straightforward, logical, bad for me but I can
understand it and work around it. But that was not mentioned by the OP.

On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 09:44:20AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:

>>Given that the number of available and useful armv6 boards has fallen
>>to almost zero, the time has come to look hard at armv6.

I'm objecting to this because "available and useful" is impossible 
to measure. "Available" is going to be a very large number, because of
the number of sales and popularity of these boards, and that they are
durable. So stuff made years ago can logically be presumed to be still
in working order. Even if 0.1% of rpi1b users used freebsd on their
boards, it'll still be a big number. FreeBSD does not record anywhere 
the context in which it is used. And "useful" depends on who is using 
it for what and is an opinion.

>NetBSD supports a lot of systems that FreeBSD does not. That fact has
>never justified having support for those systems in FreeBSD. 

I'm not saying that. What I'm asking is the reasoning.

"we don't want to support it anymore" is a reason
"no devs are interested" is a reason

"the number of available and useful armv6 boards has fallen to almost
zero" is objectively false and so therefore is not a reason. And because
it is not a reason then justifications following it will also be
incorrect.

I'm interested to know what NetBSD's reasons are in having tier-1
support for armv6, but I'll ask that on their lists.

-- 
J.