Does https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ need an update for armv6?

From: Mark Millard <marklmi_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2024 05:43:46 UTC
I CC'd Philip Paeps and Antoine Brodin because the answers for the
below probably dictate the handling of the armv6 (qemu based) jails
on various beefy*'s being deletion vs. updating-the-worlds for during
next round of updates. (Why update or keep jails that are not being
used?)

https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ indicates that armv6 is "Tier 2" in the
"13.x" column.

But armv6's most recent package building attempt of any kind was for
132releng-armv6-quarterly on beefy8 starting at Thu, 05 Oct 2023
02:37:41 GMT. (It crashed.) There are no attempted armv6 or later builds
for 13.3+ RELEASE builds after that.  (I only see public information
published by the machines.)

Even "21.2.4 Unsupported Architectures"
 ( https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#archs ) says:

"Note that ports support should remain as long as the platform is supported
in a branch supported by ports."

armv6 no longer does so for 13.3+ (supposed Tier 2) or 14.0+ (supposed
Tier 3).

I'd expect that the evidence against qemu based support being sufficient for
building armv6 package reliably --or being likely to in any sort of timely
manor-- is probably sufficient justification for official reclassification, even
if stable/13 and stable/14 system builds for tinderbox are still operational
for armv6.

May be this note is appropriate for freebsd-arch@freebsd.org <mailto:freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> too/instead?


Side notes:

I'll note that I'm not referencing armv7 here. I expect that the problems in
recent months for the ampere2 based main-armv7-default package-build
activity will prove to have been fixed at the next round of updating the
world version in each of the armv7 jails on ampere2. A bug was found and
fixed for this for main (avoiding recursive locking) and the armv7 jails look
like they will soon be updated. As I understand, these jail updates are
normally Antoine Brodin related activity.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com