Table of Contents

FreeBSD Architectures and Tiers

With respect to which architectures FreeBSD runs on, there is continuing discussion of what constitutes a FreeBSD tier. Instead of trying to see which architectures fit into which current definition, this page visualizes which platforms currently have which features.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD Projects pages for some of these architectures are stale, so some of these are guesses.

There is little doubt that there are bugs in this chart. Please coordinate with MarkLinimon.

Architecture Feature Comparison

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

x86 arm mips powerpc riscv sparc64 (4)
i386 amd64 armvX aarch64 32 64 32 64 spe
boots multiuser ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4
self-hosting ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 1 1 ✓ ✓ ✓ ? 4
base compiler clang clang clang clang gcc gcc 3 3 3 clang gcc
Release Engineering support ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ x 4
freebsd-update(8) support ✓ ✓ x x x x x x x x x
package build cluster ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ x ✓ x x 2
src Jenkins ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4

Notes

See Also

Observations

The above was partially adopted from this ancient guide from 2004.