FreeBSD will promote arm64 to a Tier 1 architecture in FreeBSD 13. This means we will provide release images, binary packages, and security and errata updates. While we anticipate there will be minor issues with this first release, we believe the port is mature enough that they can be resolved during the life of FreeBSD 13.
Maybe not massively relevant right now, but with Arm making its way into both servers and desktops, this is some good future-proofing for FreeBSD.
Also worth noting, that 13.0 marks SPARC64 as unsupported.
SPARC is a dead architecture, so it makes little sense to devote limited resources.
Old system support seems to be more of a NetBSD thing than FreeBSD.
FreeBSD never really had very good sparc64 support.
OpenBSD supports sparc64 really well, including all of the latest systems.
OpenBSD supports so many off-the-wall and obscure architectures it’s a little bit surprising they dropped VAX.
That said, they could do with improving their ARM support to the point that you can use the HDMI port from the get go.
It’s helpful to remember the original core goals of the BSDs:
NetBSD:
–> run BSD on as many architectures as possible.
. . [ NetBSD was my “gateway BSD” when we were handed an idle DEC Alpha and running NetBSD on it allowed us to use it as our Usenet server for years after DEC itself faded from the landscape. ]
FreeBSD:
–> focus on running BSD on PCs (Intel/AMD).
. . FreeBSD supported other architectures only if demand justified the work..
. . Note that FreeBSD has recently dropped i386 (32-bit) from its tier-1.
OpenBSD:
–> started as a fork from NetBSD, but where security is “Job #1”.