Gentoo Archives: gentoo-mips

From: Matt Turner <mattst88@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-mips@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-mips] Re: What kind of MIPS hardware do we have? (Looking to restart Gentoo/MIPS, need info)
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 04:03:03
Message-Id: AANLkTilY4EGiMaezn0xjrJYMM8n6PieUGQ6GL7dMF4pA@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-mips] What kind of MIPS hardware do we have? (Looking to restart Gentoo/MIPS, need info) by Matt Turner
1 On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Matt Turner <mattst88@×××××.com> wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 > I'm going to be working on Gentoo/MIPS. I'm planning to provide N32
4 > stages, and I want to know what kind of MIPS hardware people have to
5 > run Gentoo. With this info, I should be able to better prioritize the
6 > tasks.
7 >
8 > So please reply with what kind of hardware you've got.
9 >
10 > Thanks!
11 > Matt
12
13 Thanks everybody for your responses.
14
15 A bit of background: MIPS has 3 ABIs: o32, n32, n64. o32 is the common
16 denominator, but is pretty inefficient. See [1]. As I suspected, all
17 the hardware people care about can use the n32 ABI, which is quite a
18 bit better.
19
20 To summarize the hardware collection
21 - 5 MIPS III/Loongson little-endian STMicroelectronics systems (Lemote, Gdium)
22 - 11 MIPS IV big-endian SGI systems
23 - 3 MIPS IV little-endian Cobalt systems
24 - 2 MIPS64 selectable-endian Broadcom systems
25
26 I've got a working n32 big-endian installation, and am preparing an
27 n32 little-endian installation at the moment. Once these are set up,
28 I'll start preparing some n32 stages.
29
30 I think first priority should be mips4 big-endian. From there, I don't
31 know whether I should build a mips4-le stage for cobalt systems, or a
32 mips3-le stage that would work for cobalt and Loongson. Do we know of
33 any plain MIPS III little-endian hardware?
34
35 Also, the MIPS port is going to be pretty unmaintainable until we can
36 kill off ~mips from ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Currently, attempting to upgrade
37 almost anything causes something to break.
38
39 What do you guys think?
40
41 Thanks,
42 Matt
43
44 [1] http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/WhatsWrongWithO32N32N64

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