[News] End of i386 support is on its way

[fabien]

Bits from the Release Team: Cambridge sprint update

During the wonderful mini-DebConf at Cambridge, the Release Team had a sprint
and other discussions. Some of the discussed topics are worth sharing, so here
we go.


A future for the i386 architecture
==================================

Insofar as they still do, we anticipate that the kernel, d-i and images teams
will cease to support i386 in the near future. Following that, there are two
routes into running i386:

1. as a multi-arch option on an otherwise amd64 system
2. as an i386 chroot on another architecture system

We're not planning to make i386 a partial architecture in the way [1] Ubuntu
has, arch:any will still contain i386 so everything builds by
default. Maintainers who wish to drop i386 support can do so *after*
coordination with the reverse (build) dependencies of their package, as with
dropping support for any other architecture. We also like to note that we have
no opposition to changes to the baseline when these changes land (it's a port
matter).

[CwF]

We do have bookworm i686 for a few years yet. I do have one image based on i686 with wine I use in a vm and for testing old stuff. I've noticed with PAE and >4BG memory it can't count very well. I'm somewhat confident that it will be usable for years to come and has matured as much as it needs to. I already use it as a guest host for vm's served by another machine when operating on a older weak machine. Over the network as a client it can tap all the power it needs for future software to run remotely and display locally. Of course this beautiful functionality depends on X, also on the chopping block...

All hail the obsolete!

[fabien]

Long live the obsolete!

[donald]

1 more.

FreeBSD is deprecating 32-bit platforms over the next couple of major
releases. We anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6,
i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7.
Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be
retained through at least the lifetime of the stable/16 branch if not
longer. (There is currently no plan to remove support for 32-bit
binaries on 64-bit kernels.)

More background:

Since its inception, FreeBSD has aimed to provide a stable and
performant general-purpose BSD-based operating system for modern and
widely-available systems. Initially this took the form of focusing on
the i386 architecture. Over time FreeBSD has added and removed
support for various architectures based on changes in the marketplace
(in some cases, anticipated changes in the marketplace).

The decision to remove support for an architecture in particular
depends on a couple of factors including both the future viability and
availability of systems using that architecture as well as the
developer resources available in the project to continue maintaining
support. In addition, some changes and features may require explicit
support on each architecture. Architectures that are less
well-maintained can degrade into a tax on such changes delaying their
implementation on architectures with stronger support.

Looking forward, general purpose 32-bit platforms are in a state of
decline in the marketplace (some more quickly than others), and we
have a shrinking pool of developers dedicated to supporting them. Of
our existing 32-bit platforms today (i386, armv[67], powerpc), only
armv7 continues to be used in recent system designs. We feel that
FreeBSD will be better served by narrowing the focus of our developer
resources on 64-bit systems moving forward. This includes both
deprecating existing 32-bit platforms and not adding new 32-bit
platforms (e.g., FreeBSD does not plan to add a 32-bit RISC-V
architecture). Support for individual 32-bit platforms may be
extended if there is both demand and commitment to increased developer
resources.

More details on the current plans for the future of 32-bit platforms
can be found in the "General Notes Regarding Future FreeBSD Releases"
section of the 14.0 release notes at
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/

On behalf of the FreeBSD Core Team,

--
John Baldwin

Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD