Re: [gentoo-mips] n64 stages for mipsel… any interest?

[Stuart Longland]

On 14/05/17 13:54, Stuart Longland wrote:
> I suspect this will take a fortnight or so… I have contemplating
> resurrecting the old Qube II for this, but it can't compete on RAM, and
> I haven't yet built the binaries with the NOP fix flag for them to run
> on Loongson.
>
> If I get some stages built, is there any interest in the community?  I'm
> willing to throw them up somewhere where they can be mirrored (I can
> host here, but my uplink is ~1Mbps) and made accessible to all.

Well, after much compiling with a slow QEMU VM… here's the first batch.

http://www.longlandclan.id.au/~stuartl/gentoo/mips/n64/

I have not yet tried these out, *at all*, this is just the raw output
from Catalyst.  I've simply thrown them up here with GnuPG signatures,
and will be trying them out sometime this weekend on my Yeeloong, which
is presently running OpenBSD/loongson.

These *should* work on Loongson 2E/2F, and anything else that is at
least MIPS-III ISA.

I have since found out that they will *NOT* work on MIPS64r6 (i.e. I6400
on QEMU) straight-up: but *should* be able to run on such hardware (this
is not tested yet) if you do the following:

- enable MIPS64r2 emulation by compiling the kernel with
CONFIG_MIPSR2_TO_R6_EMULATOR specifying the `mipsr2emu=1` kernel argument
- specifying the `nofpu=1` kernel argument to use the in-kernel software FPU

Otherwise you'll get the kernel dying with the message runaway loop
modprobe binfmt-464c (ask how I know… thanks to Maciej Rozycki for
guiding me on that).  That's another avenue of testing I'll be doing.

As mentioned, if there's interest, I can have a crack at doing some
big-endian ones too for you SGI users out there, although given the
additional memory footprint of n64 over n32 and smaller RAM sizes of
such machines, n32 might be the better target.

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.