FreeBSD gives ARM64 green light for production over x86 alternative's 'growth trajectory' The FreeBSD project will offer "Tier 1" support to 64-bit ARM processors in FreeBSD 13.0, expected to be released shortly. The only other Tier 1 platform is AMD64. FreeBSD defines four tiers of platform support, with only Tier 1 fully supported for production use. Tier 1 architectures have official release images and full …
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There is another definition of pc98 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide#PC_98 - roughly a machine that could run windows 98.
Funny, reading that I noticed I was wrong about the colour coded mouse and keyboard ports. I had always thought that was Dell's sole computer innovation.
The pc98 was launched in 1982 - nothing to do with win98.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series#Timeline_of_PC-9801_models
Coincidently LGR just had a quick look at a Mini version of its predecessor, the PC8000 series.
I'm guessing that refers to the fact that FreeBSD is not certified to use the UNIX® trademark (which should be written in block capitals, to please the lawyers). The trademark is owned by The Open Group, of course, and currently the only licensees are Apple, IBM, Cemprus,1 HPE, Huawei,2 and SCO.3
Just another minor clash between history and law.
1You know, that Cemprus.
2Does Congress know about this? The liberty!
3Does Xinuos know about this? Have they sued themselves yet?
It is tier 2, but the release announcement specifically addresses i386 support
'the FreeBSD Release Engineering and Security Teams will continue to build, test, and distribute EN and SA artifacts for i386 alongside all other supported platforms. However, EN and SA issues that are specific to i386, or that require unique development for i386, may not be addressed. The userland ABI will continue to be preserved in 13.x similar to other Tier 1 platforms.'
It feels a tiny bit too soon to me, but probably a reasonable compromise. Realistically 32 bit BSD (all variants) will be used in embedded devices, specifically firewalls. Even my personal firewall has moved to a nice embedded 64bit AMD PCEngines device, the subset of people who'll lose out will be those with historic high speed i386 servers with decent I/O.
For desktop use AMD64 and ARM are the viable options. POWER devices are also possible, modern, and reasonably economic, but remain a minority option due to price.
What I only just realised, this opens the door for home built NAS using OpenZFS 2.0 based on ARM.
When the people of XigmaNas release their next version based on FreeBSD 13 (they’re currently using FreeBSD 12.2p5) I hope they release an ARM build too.
Especially for backup situations where you don’t have a NAS constantly pumping out gigabytes it might drastically reduce power consumption.
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