Post #2306630

2026-04-26 10:09 UTC

@jrsharp@mastodon.sdf.org @tfb@mastodon.bsd.cafe IIUC (never actually tried yet, though, as I'm on FreeBSD), NetBSD is good at separating MI / MD parts of archs / drivers, right? If so, it would be easier for NetBSD to keep many archs / drivers for already-not-manufactured devices compared with others. AFAIK, FreeBSD kept on focusing on "actual usabilities for limited archs in the wild", thus, keeping outdated hardware / arch supports to be difficult within limited resources. Most 32bit archs including i386 is dropped to Tier2 (still supported, though) and some were already removed from all supported releases. Only armv7 is kept as Tier2 for all supported releases among other 32bit archs as of quite strong objections from actual devs. (Why i386 is dropped to Tier2 and removed at 15.0 is that it alone uses 32bit time_t and switching it to 64bit makes native i386 support meaningless as of fatal backward compatibility issue.) Luckily, armv7 had 64bit time_t from its beginning (or from quite early phase on porting to it), thus, allowed to kept as Tier2. https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ Note that i386 binaries can still run on amd64 (aka x86_64 or x64) via compat32 feature, but not sure it can survive 32bit time_t epoch or not.

Replies (1)

@tfb@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-26 10:37

@TomAoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe @jrsharp@mastodon.sdf.org NetBSD runs on an abstraction layer, and only that abstraction layer needs porting. This abstraction of machine dependent parts is pervasive, and is why you can cross-compile it for any platform, from any supported host platform (including other Unixes). My experience hacking on FreeBSD itself is over two decades ago, but the situation back then was: FreeBSD is ported to several platforms. Cross compilation is difficult, and needs to be hosted on a "close enough" host. The machine dependencies are pretty deeply embedded, though it's BSD so porting to a new architecture is still going to be relatively easy. Again, this is out of date, so Free might well have learned some portability tricks in the meantime.

Open ##2306631