Last updated Fri Jun 25 06:25:49 GMT 2004

Recently there has been further discussion of what constitutes a FreeBSD 'tier'. Perhaps instead of trying to see which architectures fit into which current definition, we should try to visualize which architecture currently has which feature.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD Projects pages for some of these architectures are quite stale, so am I having to improvise a bit, by going back over email to various mailing lists that I've saved off, personal email, and commit logs. Where I saved a reference to where I got the information, I have tried to give an attribution at the end.

I have little doubt that there are bugs in this chart. Send corrections to linimon@.

I have arbitrarily chosen to list the architectures starting with the i386 to perhaps make the colors line up better.

Note:Not everyone agrees with the data presented herein. I am doing my best to try to evaluate all the information that I can find, but unfortunately do not have the time (or hardware) to independently verify most of this information. It's a "best-attempt". Your Mileage May Vary, and so forth.

feature architecture
i386 pc98 alpha amd64 ia64 sparc64 arm mips powerpc s390
boots multiuser yes yes yes yes yes yes ? no yes no
self-hosting yes yes yes yes yes yes ? no kernel only no
CVS repository yes yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes no
'make release' yes yes yes yes yes yes no no in progress no
sysinstall works yes yes yes yes yes yes ? ? in progress ?
source tinderbox yes yes yes yes yes yes no no yes no
port build cluster yes yes unstable? yes yes yes no no no no
Release Engineering support yes yes 4.x only yes no yes no no no no
Security Officer support yes yes 4.x only yes no yes no no no no
Kernel Scheduler Entities (KSE) yes yes broken kernel & userland yes, but needs wider testing yes broken kernel & userland ? ? in progress no
dynamic root yes yes yes yes requires gcc3.4 yes ? ? yes no
kld support yes yes yes from kldload only yes yes ? ? in progress no
GDB 5 from ports yes yes yes does not configure not supported yes no no no no
kernel-mode yes yes yes yes yes no no no no
GDB 6.1 from ports yes yes yes yes requires upstream merge yes no no no no
kernel mode yes yes yes incomplete missing yes no no no no
Thread Local Storage (TLS) source in perforce no no no no no no no no no
kernel support no no no no no no no no no no
compiler support yes yes requires gcc3.4 yes yes requires gcc3.4 no no no no
binutils support incomplete incomplete missing access sequences missing 64-bit mode buggy compiler error ? ? pending ?
rtld support ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? no no
threading lib support ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? no no
libthr ? ? ? no (not planned) yes ? ? ? yes no
libc_r yes yes yes yes removed yes ? ? removed ?
Linuxulator yes yes yes broken ? ? ? ? no no
NDISulator yes yes not supported broken? ? not supported
SMP yes yes yes yes broken ? ? ? no no
feature i386 pc98 alpha amd64 ia64 sparc64 arm mips powerpc s390
architecture

Alphabetical list of attributions of status items (where I know them):

Topic Source
amd64 (kse, kld items) peter/scottl
gdb6 in kernel mode marcel
ia64 marcel
kld scottl
kse scottl/eischen
Linuxulator arved
NDISulator arved
mips juli
port build cluster kris
PowerPC Andrew Gallatin, Peter Grehan
source build tinderboxen des
System/390 phk
TLS marcel