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FreeBSD 15 on desktop and FreeBSD considering end of ppc64 support
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Yorick Peterse ☛ Installing FreeBSD 15 on my desktop
This week I've been working on a script and slides for a YouTube video about Inko. After a week of doing that I needed a bit of a break. Last week I wrote a bit about FreeBSD, and specifically about wanting to try it out on my yet to be delivered Framework 16 laptop. This got me thinking: why don't I try FreeBSD on my desktop first, then see if it's still worth trying out on a laptop? After all, my desktop has a spare SSD that I don't use much, so I could move its data elsewhere temporarily and install FreeBSD on this SSD, leaving my main system untouched.
What follows is a sort of transcript (with some editing) of doing just that, a process that took a total of some three hours. Because I wrote most of this while actually performing the work, it may feel a little chaotic at times, but I hope it gives a bit of insight into the process.
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Talospace ☛ FreeBSD considering end of ppc64 support
FreeBSD is considering retiring powerpc64 prior to branching 16, which would make FreeBSD 15 the last stable version to support the architecture. (32-bit PowerPC is already dropped as of FreeBSD 14, though both OpenBSD and NetBSD generally serve this use case, and myself I have a Mac mini G4 running a custom NetBSD kernel with code from FreeBSD for automatic restart.) Although the message says "powerpc64 and powerpc64le" it later on only makes specific reference to the big-endian port, whereas both endiannesses appear on the FreeBSD platform page and on the download server.