Currently freebsd-update fails in the following manner for unsupported $ARCH's: # freebsd-update fetch Fetching public key from http://update6.freebsd.org failed. In order to improve the user experience, and provide additional context/information for particular failure scenarios, freebsd-update(8) should support returning messaging for errors/notifications/warnings from the server. This would also allow for a much better user experience in additional situations, such as when the service is experiencing issues, during maintenance and for other uses we cant think of yet.
The server is just a plain web server and doesn't have a convenient way to return a specific error message for e.g. an unsupported arch. However, I suspect that the two common errors here are unsupported arch and unsupported release, and it should be straightforward to detect those two cases in FreeBSD-update itself and report a more direct error.
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Thu Jan 24 18:51:15 UTC 2019 New revision: 343411 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/343411 Log: freebsd-update: Clarify unsupported upgrade message PR: 204115 Submitted by: Gerald Aryeetey <aryeeteygerald_rogers.com> Reviewed by: delphij MFC after: 1 month Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18916 Changes: head/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Tue Mar 5 18:26:35 UTC 2019 New revision: 344807 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/344807 Log: MFC r343411: freebsd-update: Clarify unsupported upgrade message PR: 204115 Submitted by: Gerald Aryeetey <aryeeteygerald_rogers.com> Reviewed by: delphij Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Changes: _U stable/12/ stable/12/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Tue Mar 5 18:27:30 UTC 2019 New revision: 344808 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/344808 Log: MFC r343411: freebsd-update: Clarify unsupported upgrade message PR: 204115 Submitted by: Gerald Aryeetey <aryeeteygerald_rogers.com> Reviewed by: delphij Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Changes: _U stable/11/ stable/11/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh