jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
Platform-hopping is not that unusual in the consumer space. Apples APs went through all sorts of platforms starting with the CISC 486 in the design they licensed form Avago to various flavors of RISC. I have no doubt that cost, heat, and performance were drivers in all this. Ditto re: switching from 680xx to PowerPC to Intel to Axx on the desktop side. High-volume OEMs can afford to change their minds re: processors / architectures.
I doubt this is the case with iXSystems. They don’t have the scale to justify significant processor departures, even if good compilers take care of the bulk of the work. There are so many dependencies to track down and adjust, it’s not just a brain transplant. Given Intel and AMDs adequate CPU and I/O performance, I’d suggest focusing the resources at iXSystems on fixing extant bugs and adding new features, not adding new platforms unless a really compelling reason presents itself.
I don't think it is likely that they're going to be releasing a general purpose ARM release or anything like that, but there are opportunities for licensing the core technology, or maybe something exciting like a FreeNAS Mini based on a much more compact ARM form factor.
A few people in the know around here are probably aware that I maintain a highly customized appliance version of FreeBSD that is designed for Internet service applications. I support both i386 and amd64, because the disk and memory footprints of i386 are substantially smaller than amd64 (by maybe a quarter to a third, generally speaking), and you usually don't want or need your DHCP server VM to be an amd64 based host.
I had attempted a few times to do an ARM build, but due to the special magic hacking most of the ARM platforms need to get a toehold, I didn't have that much success. Until VMware released its ESXi-on-ARM fling, that is. Then, it turned out to be about a morning's hacking plus a few tweaks over the next several days to make it usable and stable, because VMware worked correctly with straightforward EFI boot.
So my point is, that most of the stuff running ON a FreeBSD system is (or can be made to be) platform-agnostic, but the actual details of getting the bootloader/partitioning/etc set up, and other hardware specific details tend to be the vast majority of the work with these sorts of brain transplants.