Adrian Chadd wrote:
Why stop there?
Noone runs FreeBSD on real hardware anymore. Except, say netflix.
Let's just drop actual native hardware support and instead support
only the bare minimum needed to boot inside vmware, virtualbox and
xen.
Anyone needing real hardware support can install NetBSD and xen.
The irony being that NetBSD runs on really obscure hardware but nothing
that anybody anywhere uses? ;)
Adrian
On 31 March 2013 21:48, Eitan Adler <li...@eitanadler.com> wrote:
Hi,
I am writing this email to discuss the i386 architecture in FreeBSD.
Computers are getting faster, but also more memory intensive. I
can not find a laptop with less than 4 or 8 GB of RAM. Modern
browsers, such as Firefox, require a 64bit architecture and 8GB of
RAM. A 32 bit platform is not enough now a days on systems with
more than 4 GB of RAM. A 32 bit core now is like 640K of RAM in
the 1990s. Even in the embedded world ARM is going 64 bit with
ARMv8.
Secondly, the i386 port is unmaintained. Very few developers run
it, so it doesn't get the testing it deserves. Almost every user
post or bug report I see from a x86 compatible processor is running
amd64. When was the last time you booted i386 outside a virtual
machine? Often times the build works for amd64 but fails for i386.
Finally, others are dropping support for i386. Windows Server 2008
is 64 bit only, OSX Mountain Lion (10.8) is 64-bit only. Users
and downstream vendors no longer care about preserving ancient
hardware.
I hope this email is enough to convince you that on this date we
should drop support for the i386 architecture for 10.0 to tier 2
and replace it with the ARM architecture as Tier 1.
--
Eitan Adler
_______________________________________________
freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
