Is Tier 2 i386 at the end of the road already?

Cost of doing business? I mean, sure, you're solving their problem temporarily, but eventually that's not gonna work and then it's time to spend money.
You are 75 years old.
You have a few more years in your business before you retire.
Dropping $30k for a few more years is a fool's errand.
All they really need is stable hardware to last the few more years they require.

Not everybody is a young person, nor can everybody pop $30k for a mom 'n pop business.
This is NOT a one-size-fits-all world.
 
I have found this weekend that the intel i915 kernel module is not available for some 32-bit systems in 13.5-RELEASE
This sounds a little bit ambiguous and I am not sure what it exactly it means.
But that's the real problem that you have and the one you may want to try to solve.
Or at least to share more details about.

The rest of the tirade sounded like quite a stretch.
I am not aware of any i386 demotion between 13.4 and 13..5
 
You have a few more years

Maybe back in 2004 when it was clear that 64-bit is the thing to do, you make that transition. Or you fold early. I'm sure there are things you can do to make it last longer, but that's not a FreeBSD problem, IMO.
 
I am not aware of any i386 demotion between 13.4 and 13..5
Nor was I until an upgrade from 13.4 to 13.5 failed to work with the the intel 945GSE Express that is in the netbook.

FreeBSD 13.5 X86 may work with that chipset, or similar intel chipsets in other machines, but it doesn't work on a 16 year old Samsung N140. The end of 32-bit X86 support will arrive for us all, not necessarily at the same time. For some, it was years ago, for others, that day has yet to arrive. For me, it was last week. I have moved on. I only use FreeBSD on amd64 now. Moving forward, I will only use FreeBSD on Tier 1 platforms.
 
I mean, have you tried to understand why?
I tried a few things at the time, but as I was in the middle of setting up some network switches, I completed that task first before going back to the non-functional netbook. I guess, because the platform is Tier 2, I wasn't expecting anyone to have any interest in fixing this fault, so I moved quickly to another 32-bit OS.

My guess is that it's a DRM issue with 13.5. I didn't try the older xfree86/xorg drivers on this netbook, and probably should have. I have switched between new and old before on other machines when I had problems with DRM. I have had a long and productive run with X86 FreeBSD but I am unlikely to spend any more time on it. I have removed my Poudriere builds for X86 and 32-bit cross-compiled ARMv6 and ARMv7 this week.
 
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