Guest post by The FreeBSD Foundation published a report yesterday on the status of FreeBSD running on 64-bit ARM processors. Work to port FreeBSD to the 64-bit ARM architecture has been progressing quickly and it is now possible to boot a FreeBSD installation into single user mode on the young architecture.
The kernel bring-up portion of the project is nearing completion; FreeBSD/arm64 boots to single-user mode on ARM’s reference simulator. Work is underway on the remaining kernel drivers, and on userland support. This project’s overall goal is to bring FreeBSD/arm64 to a Tier-1 status, including release media and prebuilt package sets. More information about the arm64 port can be found on the FreeBSD wiki.
It used to be NetBSD the BSD which ran on most architectures. Now it only supports x86 and obsolete architectures.
It good to see that FreeBSD and OpenBSD teams are not giving up like NetBSD did.
What’s up with the whole anti-NetBSD propaganda? It’s not even news about NetBSD.
NetBSD is still the BSD that runs on the most architectures, including modern ARM and MIPS variants. Maybe no aarm64 yet, but it’s a matter of time. Additionally, supporting obsolete architectures is in no way “giving up”, it is actually a hard work to keep them supported (and not only in keeping them alive, a lot of new drivers are being developed etc.). Some people care about that…
Edited 2014-11-26 19:27 UTC
How many? Let’s get back to Amiga example. How many people in the world insist on installing NetBSD on original Amiga hardware? On hardware with very slow (for today’s standards) processor, and with very limited RAM?
IMHO it’s waste of scarce resources (programmers’ time and effort). Yes, I agree: it’s your resource, and you can use it whichever way you prefer (but still I can have my own opinion, right?).
I would have thought it imperative that all OSes get on with this sort of work asap to ensure there are other offerings in this architecture area than just the biggies. Perhaps even collaborative efforts could be made to speed up the work.