FreeBSD’s support for the ARM architecture is upgraded to Tier 1

The FreeBSD project announced through the developer mailing list that starting with FreeBSD 13, FreeBSD’s support level for the arm64 architecture (also known as AArch64) will be upgraded to Tier 1. This means that FreeBSD will provide release images, binary packages, security, and errata updates for arm64 devices. Of course, there will inevitably be minor flaws in supporting the changes to the new architecture, but the FreeBSD team believes that the current port is mature enough and they will solve the problem during the life of FreeBSD 13.

The FreeBSD team also mentioned in the announcement that they started the development of FreeBSD/arm64 as early as 2014, and Arm, Cavium, and the FreeBSD Foundation provided financial and technical support. FreeBSD 11.0, released in October 2016, was the first version to support this architecture. This version improved the kernel, toolchain, user interface, and ports. The software package infrastructure has been optimized and improved since then.

The maturity of the AArch64 ecosystem ensures the diversity of its products and the subsequent development of its hardware. The FreeBSD team believes that AArch64 will be an important part of the market in the next few years, and FreeBSD can benefit from increased support for this architecture platform and upgrading the support level to Tier 1.