Selection of roadmap for i386 platform End-of-Life (EOL)

John Marino dragonflybsd at marino.st
Thu Apr 25 23:12:04 PDT 2013


On 4/26/2013 05:16, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>      There's still one serious issue which is that Intel's initial
>      foray into mobile is 32-bit.  We can't really EOL 32-bit as long
>      as Intel and/or AMD are still producing 32-bit-only chips.

Would DragonFly legitimately ever be installed on such a chip?  As 
interesting as it would be, I don't see DragonFly ever powering a phone 
or mobile device. (does this mean tablet?)

>      (Though even in the mobile space I expect things will move rapidly
>      to 64-bit due to competition from ARM).
>
>      Other then that, 32-bit is dead.  Even minimalist machines coming
>      out today can have more than 4G and the larger KVM area on 64-bit
>      is becoming very important for resource management.

 From what I've seen, DragonFly has never targeted every device or older 
devices.  Other Operating Systems have that "mission", but DragonFly is 
getting a reputation as the "innovation" BSD and that implies a more 
aggressive approach to features that can impeded.  If the chips you 
mention above won't realistically run DragonFly anyway, I don't see that 
as a blocker or "serious issue" regarding 32-bit EOL, but then everyone 
already knew that.  :)

John



More information about the Kernel mailing list