Re: Future of armv7

On November 24, 2025 5:04:40 AM GMT+02:00, Tomek CEDRO <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 1:58 AM Sulev-Madis Silber
><[email protected]> wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> 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!
>
>Open-Source can be used for free, but the development is not free,
>even as individual you need to pay bills, food, tools, cat, lady, and
>many more things that are not free, also you pay with your time that
>you will never get back.
>
>Who benefits most from you writing Open-Source for a specific
>hardware? Hardware vendor and the whole supply chain right?
>
>So what is the point of spending all of your own resources, including
>time, just to make things working on a device, that in return bumps
>sales of that device, when you have absolutely nothing in return?
>
>How about any of these mentioned companies contract developers for
>porting OS and drivers to their hardware?
>
>
>> i'm not so much pissed of armv7 going but more like where's the aarch64 hw to move onto?
>
>Alternative is always good point. But who will pay for porting OS to aarch64?
>
>
>> is freebsd something where hw support is added, perfected, and quickly removed?
>
>When you create complex software its maintenance over time is more
>expensive than development and at some point it only becomes a burden
>rather than asset.
>
>
>> 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
>
>Yes, also the documentation is problem here because they only care
>about Linux, for some reason very popular, I guess its a good balance
>between price and features / quality. Also rPI-5 is almost as powerful
>as my old PC at 60x less power consumption. But FreeBSD does not work
>there as on the PC.
>
>
>> 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)
>
>Yes, in a perfect world Vendor would pay for drivers development for
>their products (i.e. SoC / MCU) and the drivers are created in a way
>that can be easily applied to any OS/RTOS no matter what their
>internal API or license. But this is only a theory. I tried that for
>years and failed. Open-Source crows is fighting each other while
>Vendor accounts their sales income.
>
>
>Reality is about what you wish and what you can, between what you do
>and what are the results :-)
>
>--
>CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
>


i couldn't figure out where to stick interleaved replies

also minsoo choo one also had points


anyway, yes, i thought of i wish i could just fucking pay to have support added. also thought i'll have hw available over network to dev on

like good open documented lts hw (allwinner?) for ip gpio extenders i'm interested in. call them iot devices if you wish

the problem is that how do i make that in first place. that money to pay for a lady-cat & food and so on. oh i'm trying to. we'll see how this works out eventually

i vaguely see from all over the place how hw is even used in secret places which is cool. i put some effort, as i could, to test bbb now it's running somewhere like that. i even have one just here with me working for 10 years

i think there must be more of those places that use embedded fbsd commercially but they seem to be very well hidden. bigger hw you can even see from commit logs who uses it. small, i'm unsure. maybe they can't show it, maybe they just pay money instead and it's not attributed on purpose. maybe that happens via devs too

no idea where fbsd is used at all, maybe it shows movies to some people, maybe it literally kills others, maybe it feeds someones pet

i recall that 10 years ago there was as if more embedded fbsd. now i sometimes have issues that gives me a feeling that as if nobody uses things at all. as if it's below hobby level usage

that's all very sad

btw can anyone point me states of hw support? like which one is at best, which at worst. i'm trying to fish that info out of mailing lists, google, forum, wiki, commit logs, src tree

it's either so vague because:

1) it's not there
2) it's top secret

but yeah i have been hacking fbsd since 4.6. it has been over 23 years of that. i'm 42 now, so it's over half of my lifetime already. if i could eventually earn money by using fbsd, you bet it's going too. so far it's not really happening yet

but yeah, for h618 i even have code i have hard time understanding but which supposedly runs on 13. tried to reach out for other interested parties but didn't get like anyone's attention. might as well try on my own. last time i tried i deleted it all off due i was messing it up. and there was no way to knowing if any of that doesn't burn hw up or is it secure. and then supposedly it's specs (soc hw in question) is nda matter eh as i heard. and how it's minor upgrade to h616 which is similar to h6. while all h* is allwinner line for commercial temperatured tv set top box video players

i don't know what to think any of this. i see dev happening as if veeery barely. like it's staying float and each time it's trying to go underwater somebody is like where are you going and drags it up again. but it's not swimming at all eh. felt much better 10y ago

but you say this has professional use behind it? at least some socs?

i did some stats on my own too. i looked into port maintainers. filtered out ones which looked like any sort of entity and counted them. found lot of interesting stuff. of course it's that's stats and therefore above big lies but yeah. some vendors do indeed maintain their own hw on fbsd. all of this is for amd64

yeah, if you look who uses and devs and supports and contributes for amd64 it seems like everyone is. it's active world

what the hell is with embedded?

sure, the standards are bit better here but there is still different hw. and there is visibly more work being done there

but with embedded, i don't know

several people have also died in fbsd. the fall of certain hw felt like as if it were truly single man operation there. that's just sad

everything this is quite sad and i have no idea how to improve it all

oh and i probably stayed with fbsd because it had very good handbook. oh and there was not many changes. but no changes no hw too eh

so yeah in the end i have no idea what to do or think...