Re: Future of 32-bit platforms (including i386)

On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 8:45 PM Hans Petter Selasky <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 4/28/23 01:50, Jessica Clarke wrote:
> > On 28 Apr 2023, at 00:44, Hans Petter Selasky <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 4/27/23 19:19, John Baldwin wrote:
> >>> For 13.0, i386 was demoted from Tier 1 to Tier 2.  In the announcement
> >>> of this for 13.0, the project committed to an update on i386's future
> >>> around the time of 14.0.  The announcement at the time suggested that
> >>> i386 would be supported less in 14.x than in 13.x.
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> This makes me think about all the issues about the "long" type in the
> past, and printf() and more, being caught when compiling TARGET_ARCH=i386 .
> >>
> >> Maybe just put the following line of code somewhere central :-)
> >>
> >> _Static_assert(sizeof(long) == 8);
> >>
> >> Will there ever be some kind of hybrid CPU systems?
> >>
> >> 4 cores AMD64, 4 cores AARCH64 and some virtual QEMU CPUs all running
> on the same system?
> >>
> >> I mean, the arm vs intel battle is not going to end soonish. And
> emulating CPUs is slow and waste electricity. Why not have one computer
> having both kind of CPUs, and one OS, and one harddisk? And figure out a
> common ABI allowing seamless task switching between them? I know there are
> some hard differences, but can't those be ironed out?
> >
> > I don’t know where to start with this other than to give an emphatic no
> to almost all of what you said, or at least the bits for which meaning can
> be extracted. Regardless, this is not the place for such pie-in-the-sky
> discussions; if you want to theorise about weird and wacky computer
> architectures then please take it elsewhere.
> >
>
> Hi Jess,
>
> I'd like to know why you think this is a wacky idea, to have a super-set
> computer architecture, where each CPU can run the full instruction set
> of both ARM64 and AARCH64 at the same time.
>
> You have an open invitation for a video call on FaceBook or whatever you
> prefer to talk about this. Send me something off-list.
>
> --HPS
>
>
It is not necessary to go to a very far distant future .

Assume you have a cluster of boards with different CPUs .
Then schedule execution of your programs with respect to the required CPU
on this cluster .

Is this possible with FreeBSD ?
Is it a good or bad idea to have such a facility ?




Mehmet Erol Sanliturk