[rescue] FreeBSD, was Re: [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Rumors flying

[Mark Linimon]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 05:12:53PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> Ahh.  Typically misguided FreeBSD developers.  Gee, let's support the
> architecture that hasn't been current for years, but de-support the
> current one because it isn't "relevant".

Support was never *completed*, so it could not have been "de-supported".

There was one developer working on it; IIUC, he got as far as having
it boot but then immediately crashing somewhere in the VM code.

No one else stepped up to continue the work when he moved on to other
things.

Almost all FreeBSD development activity these days is on amd64 or one
of the arm architectures (armv6 and aarch64 for 32-bit and 64-bit,
repectively).

mips and mips64 support lags.  Some companies who use FreeBSD to build
their products use mips64, but IIUC their codebases have diverged significantly
from FreeBSD-current, and it's hard to find people willing to spend the
time to merge things together.

sparc64 support is "stable".

Some new work is being done on powerpc64 for the very latest IBM machines.
I'm not sure I'm at liberty to talk more about this, as some of it may be
under NDA.  Older powerpc macs and IBM boxes are supported but the userbase
is small.

Folks, I spend a lot of time working on this OS.  Please feel free to
ask me questions rather than speculating.  Finally, if people think I'm
spamming the list, I'll quiet down.

mcl