It's always interesting to read about an OS, and the implied toolchain from the ISA vendors PoV. It helps them to have diversity of OS above, because .. well because it stands to show its a generalised engine, not a captive portal to one OS vision. There are going to be projects, products heading to ARM ISA which will come out of a BSD model, and being able to say "yep: got that" will mean they get better sales in that segment.
Back in the days of mainframes, it wasn't unusual for the vendor to talk to clients about instruction-set needs. Dec did, they added stuff to the Dec-10 because the buyer wanted it. I doubt many people used the User Defined Instruction stuff, but some did.
Dec also invested in DECUS tape swapping. They were totally fine with people having the VMS code in Bliss-32 microfiche sets. It was a useful 2-way street.
I don't think its a huge stretch from that, to having ARM talk to FreeBSD about emerging tech in their chip, and ways to make the OS and compiler toolchain use it.
One level up the foodchain, I kind-of wish the same was true for Raspberry Pi, their use of uboot, their design decisions with the machine they make out of the ARM chip wrapped in Broadcom's vision of it: I sense that it's nothing like as useful a relationship, the Pi series work with FreeBSD but it has a lot of if-but-maybe about it. Broadcom still seem to think (I am an outsider: what would I know) that blobs are fine, their IPR has to be defended, talking about how things work is risky. Why?
Back in the days of mainframes, it wasn't unusual for the vendor to talk to clients about instruction-set needs. Dec did, they added stuff to the Dec-10 because the buyer wanted it. I doubt many people used the User Defined Instruction stuff, but some did.
Dec also invested in DECUS tape swapping. They were totally fine with people having the VMS code in Bliss-32 microfiche sets. It was a useful 2-way street.
I don't think its a huge stretch from that, to having ARM talk to FreeBSD about emerging tech in their chip, and ways to make the OS and compiler toolchain use it.
One level up the foodchain, I kind-of wish the same was true for Raspberry Pi, their use of uboot, their design decisions with the machine they make out of the ARM chip wrapped in Broadcom's vision of it: I sense that it's nothing like as useful a relationship, the Pi series work with FreeBSD but it has a lot of if-but-maybe about it. Broadcom still seem to think (I am an outsider: what would I know) that blobs are fine, their IPR has to be defended, talking about how things work is risky. Why?