HEADS UP: FreeBSD is stopping all 32-bit Hardware support except ARMv7

kpedersen said:
Arguably the sort of humans that run ancient hardware, are more likely to be technical or passionate enough about the technical details to be more valuable in terms of contributions compared to i.e a bunch of Steam DRM Platform gamers wanting fancy and gimmicky desktop environments.
Click to expand...
I wonder what's stopping that technical and passionate "sort of humans" from contributing NOW (or previously). All I have seen in this thread is pretty unconstructive "you must fix the issues or I will switch to linux".
 
  • Like
Reactions: mer
yuripv79 said:
All I have seen in this thread is pretty unconstructive "you must fix the issues or I will switch to linux".
Click to expand...
Linux is no solution for trying to keep 586-CPUs alive. It was them starting abandoning. The BSDs were keeping pre 686CPUs. But FreeBSD is becoming more Linux-like now. NetBSD has 32-bit still as Tier 1. So the switch may go there.

Above I asked how to keep 586 alive. No answers so far. A nitpicking debate is no help.
 
yuripv79 said:
I wonder what's stopping that technical and passionate "sort of humans" from contributing NOW (or previously).
Click to expand...
They have been doing it up to now have they not? Are you assuming FreeBSD's current 32-bit intel support is only due to paid contractors? :p

x86 FreeBSD works fine, so I am very thankful to those technical and passionate sorts of humans.
 
mer said:
Could you clarify this? Asking because I disagree and I want to know why you think this.
Click to expand...
At the time of my writing I had the abandoning of CPUs in mind. And the increasing dependency on Linux-Sources i.e. openzfs and graphics.
 
I see a lot of unconstructive, even slightly aggressive nagging these last days on here, this is just one of the threads. What do you (whoever it concerns) think you'll accomplish that way? :-/

And I'm even posting this question to this thread, although I'm one of those who would love to see i386 around for another while. I already submitted a few i386-related fixes to ports when they hit me in my poudriere builds. That's a tiny tiny fraction of the work that would be needed. I don't even think about contributing to src at this time, would have to know it much better first. So, indeed, just contribute, in whatever way you can. Or, if you must, run something else on your i386 machines (until support is dropped there as well...)
 
yuripv79 said:
so the question is likely about some other technical and passionate humans who will come to save i386, but being late to the party (at the time of writing).
Click to expand...
I think it is possible (similar to Arch Linux's 32-bit project).

Keeping it tier 2 would at least reduce the work of it being stripped out completely, only for them to have to reimplement it all.

Perhaps unlikely but still more likely than FreeBSD ever changing goals and becoming a soft fluffy, user-friendly macOS clone and attracting users that way.
 
armv6 was already dropped and there were no complaints
i tought people would rather have pi zeros than crappy pentiums :)
 
getopt said:
The BSDs were keeping pre 686CPUs. But FreeBSD is becoming more Linux-like now. NetBSD has 32-bit still as Tier 1. So the switch may go there.
Click to expand...
FreeBSD and NetBSD/OpenBSD are different on concept at the beginning.
FreeBSD focused on performance and stability on SINGLE ARCHITECTURE, while NetBSD focused on PORTABILITY. OpenBSD derived later from NetBSD concerning SECURITY. If I understand correctly, NetBSD divided their codes into MI (machine independent) part and MD (machine dependent) part to ease porting in very, very early phase, while FreeBSD is still on the way.
You can see how early FreeBSD and NetBSD are derived from 4.4BSD Lite2 on /usr/share/misc/bsd-family-tree.
Note that codes directly derived from 4.3BSD NET/2 and 4.4BSD Lite are abandoned with patent issues and rebased with 4.4BSD Lite2 (If I recall correctly, this was forced to all BSD-derived OSes).
 
ralphbsz said:
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is operating an IBM 1401, which was built in 1961. That makes it 63 years old. It runs every Wednesday and Saturday. The oldest functioning disk drive is in the same museum, the 1957 RAMAC; that's nearly 70 years old. To be honest, it's not fully functioning: While the data on disk can be read, they do not allow new data to be written. I think the electronics on this drive has been replaced with modern emulation. Supposedly there is another disk drive the same age in a different museum, which has the original electronics, but it doesn't function fully. I think the RAMAC is also run for demonstration once or twice a week.

I (with a little sadness) agree with the decision for FreeBSD to drop support for the i386. I can imagine that it takes quite a bit of extra work to support, the project is short on humans, and it's not worth it. Even if it forced me to re-install my OS a few weeks ago.
Click to expand...

Yes, however, I'm sure they've had plenty of repairs too - something that is much easier on computers of that era. Those can (in theory) be kept running almost indefinitely if you have someone that knows how. Can't say the same about modern hardware though.

PMc said:
Anyway, the stuff that I built fourty years ago does still work, some of my disks run 24/7 since 23 years, and the pentium-2 mainboard did run fine when I last started it.
Click to expand...

Well, consider yourself lucky. I've seen plenty of modernish computers that didn't go half that long before developing serious/critical issues (usually electrical degradation). They don't have to be running for things to go bad either. Entropy doesn't sleep. This is going to become more and more of a problem as time goes on too - especially in the retro community.

Also it's not a great idea to run any disk drive for 23 years straight 24/7 - how do you know it's even working right? Asking for trouble.
 
oops said:
According to KNOWN_ARCHES in /usr/src/Makefile.inc1 on -CURRENT both armv6 and i386 are still supported. The removal plan has yet to be acted on.
Click to expand...
Yes. Decision for whether dropping at upcoming 15.0-Release or not would be made before stable/15 branches. But it would be around 2 years later or so. If someone possible to maintain them pops in earlier enough, the supports could be kept, unknown for now, though. If not, 14.x would be the last branch that i386 and some more 32bit archs are supported.
 
qurier said:
… I did not get …
Click to expand...

Involving FreeBSD 13 and 14, where you installed 14 …

qurier said:
… I honestly did not expect FreeBSD to do this. …
Click to expand...

release notes for 14.0 included general notes regarding future FreeBSD releases.

www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD 14.0 Release Information

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org

I'm not without sympathy, however it is important to take note of such things.
 
grahamperrin said:
Involving FreeBSD 13 and 14, where you installed 14 …
Click to expand...
Yes. I tried 13 on the same machine a while ago. It showed this same issue, so I included 13 as well.

grahamperrin said:
release notes for 14.0 included general notes regarding future FreeBSD releases.
Click to expand...
Yes, it seems to say:

FreeBSD 15.0 is not expected to include support for 32-bitplatforms other than armv7. The armv6, i386, and powerpc platformsare deprecated and will be removed.
Click to expand...
But even on 14 things are not working. It's broken for me. What's the use of reading this? I did not get the solution on 14, following the Handbook instructions.

First people tell me to replace the hardware, telling me that it is not going to work. Then I had Void Linux 32-bit running fine with acceleration working as expected. They do not even use MESA Amber, it is just plain mesa and it still works. It is working hardware and people told me replace it. How come? I didn't expect this from FreeBSD community.

The issue is on FreeBSD side. It is no use trying to blame me.

If you have anything that I can try, tell me, otherwise blaming the user will not make FreeBSD more acceptable to me.
 
You can install either NetBSD or OpenSolaris. They have a 32-bit userland. Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037, just one year short of y2k38. Makes you wonder...

Legacy 32-bit architectures are a massive headache when trying to work out solutions for legacy API's that use 32-bit time, sizes, etc. while trying at the same time not to break ABI, etc.

Read the first 3 entries on this blog to get an idea why: https://www.thkukuk.de/blog/
 
rbranco said:
You can install either NetBSD or OpenSolaris. They have a 32-bit userland.
Click to expand...
Not a bad idea. I tried NetBSD 10 RC 32-bit for some days. One of the limitations is that they don't have latest firefox on 32-bit on 10 RC (at least yet). Only version ESR 102 on i386. Some of the software I want is not on repos. Some of them don't build (due to unsolved Issues in either project source or dependencies on NetBSD platform). One of the examples being GNOME Secrets.
Another issue is that documentation is scarce for NetBSD, even worse than what FreeBSD has.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top