Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:02:17 +0000 From: Minsoo Choo <minsoochoo0122@proton.me> To: Sulev-Madis Silber <freebsd-arch-freebsd-org789@ketas.si.pri.ee> Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Future of armv7 Message-ID: <v0tuUCWXanLihM_-4rcmy90YB6j1yyXWUeAdudMFFuTO1ge9FG5o3Zo-p9zHupyq3AF8fpZ1TRZ4WJiPUK3pz-nUL0lmrmUYKh553-VuS74=@proton.me> In-Reply-To: <2F44E83A-AEC3-4A36-8A90-1FC8AD377A55@ketas.si.pri.ee> References: <2F44E83A-AEC3-4A36-8A90-1FC8AD377A55@ketas.si.pri.ee>
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On Sunday, November 23rd, 2025 at 7:58 PM, Sulev-Madis Silber <freebsd-arch-freebsd-org789@ketas.si.pri.ee> wrote: > i watch this and i have question! > > why does fbsd support more 32bit arms than 64bit arms? > > if i look under allwinner section, i see 6 32bit socs and 3 64bit socs, why? allwinner has like, what, ~50, 64bit socs?! they come on devboards too > > one of them is h618 which has cheap boards on which has one dev who lost interest and one potential user with dusty hw. why is it like that? and then we plan to remove 32bit arms > > they also still make mips devices, which fbsd doesn't support anymore. those also target low power devices > > i'm not so much pissed of armv7 going but more like where's the aarch64 hw to move onto? > > bbb has praised for being good hw and i have it too. it doesn't work even now? and what about it's brother, 64bit one? ti also still makes socs! > > is freebsd something where hw support is added, perfected, and quickly removed? > > ok, i vaguely understand the frustration of handholding every different special snowflake piece of hw but there has to be some solution > > i also never get why whole world revolves around rpi's as they don't make best nor cheapest boards but i guess those would need support too then > > it would be awesome if fbsd would support arch that's common, be it armv7, aarch64, riscv64, or nga128 (completely made up 128bit next good arch platform) > > and it would support reasonable set of platforms for reasonable set of usecases, be it server, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, iot, industrial, whatever Simply saying, cost is the issue. There are so many different arm boards that need different code to support. Most contributors buy dev boards to run their project on them, and porting the OS to those boards is a side quest for the project. If someone wants to see devboard support on FreeBSD, they can pay professionals or donate the hardware to the foundation. > also when armv7 support is removed i bet ton of people appear and ask why that decision was made behind their backs because it was > > when i heard how usage stats was taken i was like wait a sec, surveys and downloads? that's it? that would only happen if people making decisions were as far from real life as possible > > people attribute all that to politicans often, decision is made wrong, behind one's back, citizen is required to shuffle through ten thousand public documents to see if he was tricked again, and if (s)he misses it, it's automatically default accepted. later it's told how noone objected. noone even knew what, when, how to object FreeBSD doesn't send system information collection to the centralized governance like Windows or macOS do. It also doesn't conduct hardware survey like Steam. This is because many use cases of FreeBSD is embedded or systems where they cannot join the survey due to security issue (take a look at a ppc64 thread). FreeBSD is a project maintained by contributors, not corporation. The only "politicians" in this project are the nine core team members, elected by committers every two years. Don't have the mindset that FreeBSD contributers HAVE TO serve all of its users. No one forces users to pay "tax" or serve the project through specific actions. Still, we try our best to keep up with their expectation. Mailing lists exist to hear users' opinions. Yes, I agree with you that our survey method failed to hear everyone's voice. So here it is: this mailing thread is our last chance to discuss on this matter, and thankfully, many people have shown their voice whether they support the removal or not. FreeBSD has always encouraged users to join the mailing list conversations, so if a user missed this, it is not our fault.
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