Re: FreeBSD 14: Poll armv6 deprecated or removed

tech-lists <[email protected]> Thu, 4 Nov 2021 14:50:53 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.os.freebsd.architechture,gmane.os.freebsd.devel.arm
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Wed, Nov 03, 2021 at 09:52:19AM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:

>FreeBSD wants any audience to help support the features they demand. Since
>this particular audience has not, what may cause it to in the future? Not a
>rhetorical question nor a vote for removing, this is a perennial problem in
>open source and I am curious how you think this works so I can incorporate
>it into my opinion.

Maybe the audience isn't demanding? It doesn't mean the audience isn't
there. perl and python and shell scripting work fine on these boards. 
Issues with these things would I guess be taken up with those maintainers. 
The hardware is very stable. I'd expect that a lot more users might pipe 
up if their freebsd os needed updating for some newer python only to find 
it couldn't be updated anymore. The first of those to pipe up i'd guess 
be those with boards that have an internet-facing connection, as the 
pressure to keep fully updated is a lot less within a firewalled LAN.

OpenBSD immediately after install has an email on the system giving a
method to send in a dmesg. I don't know if it gives them a handle on the
number of users and what their hardware is, but it's better than nothing
at all, which is where FreeBSD is. Although there is a port called
sysutils/hw-probe, one needs to know about it first. It's not in base.

For armv6 in particular though, I've not heard of any reason justifying
*why* getting rid of it. At least if it's in base we can compile ports
for it ourselves. mips/mips64 stopped because the working group stopped
working with it, fair enough. This isn't the case with armv6.

It might be helpful looking from another viewpoint - why is armv6 a
tier1 architecture on NetBSD?
-- 
J.

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