FreeBSD phasing out 32-bit platforms

The FreeBSD Project has announced that it intends to deprecate 32-bit platforms 'over the next couple of major releases'.

We anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7. Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be retained through at least the lifetime of the stable/16 branch if not longer.

The announcement notes that support for some 32-bit platforms 'may be extended if there is both demand and commitment to increased developer resources'. More details about the current plans for 32-bit platforms are available in the FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE Release Notes.