Re: FreeBSD 14: Poll armv6 deprecated or removed

On 2021-Nov-4, at 13:39, tech-lists <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 04, 2021 at 11:53:18AM -0700, Mark Millard via freebsd-arch wrote:
> 
>> Without one or more developers willing to keep ARM11 based RPi* FreeBSD
>> working as FreeBSD updates, the code will break. Other architectures
>> have been removed for such. Folks that do not want to work on such code
>> do not want to have to work on it to keep FreeBSD building and operating
>> for other architectures that have active developmers/maintainers.
>> 
>> If there were active FreeBSD developers for ARM11 RPi*'s, the removal
>> would have been unlikely to be proposed at all, even if the use was
>> minor. FreeBSD is driven by the developer context directly, not the
>> usage context directly. 
> 
> OK. I can understand that. No developers want to work on it so no
> interest. That's straightforward, logical, bad for me but I can
> understand it and work around it. But that was not mentioned by the OP.
> 
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 09:44:20AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
>>> Given that the number of available and useful armv6 boards has fallen
>>> to almost zero, the time has come to look hard at armv6.
> 
> I'm objecting to this because "available and useful" is impossible to measure. "Available" is going to be a very large number, because of
> the number of sales and popularity of these boards, and that they are
> durable. So stuff made years ago can logically be presumed to be still
> in working order. Even if 0.1% of rpi1b users used freebsd on their
> boards, it'll still be a big number. FreeBSD does not record anywhere the context in which it is used. And "useful" depends on who is using it for what and is an opinion.
> 
>> NetBSD supports a lot of systems that FreeBSD does not. That fact has
>> never justified having support for those systems in FreeBSD. 
> 
> I'm not saying that. What I'm asking is the reasoning.
> 
> "we don't want to support it anymore" is a reason
> "no devs are interested" is a reason
> 
> "the number of available and useful armv6 boards has fallen to almost
> zero" is objectively false and so therefore is not a reason. And because
> it is not a reason then justifications following it will also be
> incorrect.

I'll note that:

https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.2.html

indicates: ARMv6 (Raspberry Pi 1 only)

so NetBSD does not have general armv6 support, just support for
the RPi*'s that are ARM11 based. (Another page mentions RPi0 and
RPi0w examples as "expected to work", although needing FDT files.
See: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/ and its
earmv6hf material.)

The lack of a variety of sources of armv6 or ARM11 that NetBSD
supports is likely a kind of property being referenced: even for
NetBSD no other ARM11's are targeted.

Basically, even for NetBSD, one has to be interested in supporting
(some) RPi*'s in order to be interested in supporting ARM11. There
is not much of any other ARM11 market for NetBSD (or FreeBSD).

> 
> I'm interested to know what NetBSD's reasons are in having tier-1
> support for armv6, but I'll ask that on their lists.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)