Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 21:25:12 +0000 From: "Ruslan Bukin" <br@bsdpad.com> To: "John Baldwin" <jhb@FreeBSD.org>, <arch@FreeBSD.org> Cc: <owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: Future of armv7 Message-ID: <DE9L3C8MYW4T.3BZZXB12SMSSL@bsdpad.com> In-Reply-To: <8aa378a1-94fb-4cb1-9bca-8e68eb8e0938@FreeBSD.org>
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I'm voting for removal as while it still works, it is not future proof as a target for a general-purpose OS for many reasons: - most developers today think in 64-bit terms by default - toolchains and libraries increasingly assume 64-bit - no major vendor support - armv7 is a legacy ISA (effectively) - all phones on earth are 64 bit - modern OS features are fundamentally 64-bit - testing new features on 32 bit not happening Developers should be focusing on arm64/amd64 and riscv64 instead. Older hardware don't stop working, it can happily use older releases of FreeBSD, just no major updates. Older Hardware -> Older FreeBSD ! Ruslan On Fri Nov 14, 2025 at 5:09 PM UTC, John Baldwin wrote: > Two and a half years ago when we first began talking about deprecating > 32-bit architectures in 15.0, we decided to keep armv7 for at least > the stable/15 branch but did not commit to anything beyond that. Now > that 15.0 is close to shipping and we are turning our development > focus to 16.0, we should figure out what we want to say about armv7 > for 16.x in the 15.0 release notes so that users have suitable notice. > > In particular, do we want to deprecate armv7 in 16.0 (similar to the > state of 32-bit powerpc in 15.0), or do we want to keep it? > > My initial suggestion is that we announce that we plan to deprecate it > in 16.0. In that case, I would also suggest that we follow a similar > process of keeping armv7 for most of the lifetime of 16.0 so that we > can reneg if need be during the 16.0 cycle. > > What do other folks think?home | help
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