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

[Stuart Longland]

Hi all,

I've decided to dust off the old Lemote Yeeloong that I have kicking
around for use as a throw-around netbook for on-the-road use.

The aim is to have a machine that can do some basic web browsing (using
a decent browser, dillo won't cut it), image editing, and maybe some
amateur radio stuff (yes, done PSK31 with this beast before, operating
as VK4MM, so it does work).

I've found though that Firefox won't build on n32 (build system
misbehaves, it does the same on AMD64 x32 too), and while o32 works, its
performance is a little, lack-lustre.

Thus as part of this, I am bootstrapping some n64 stages as an
experiment.  n64 of course isn't as fast as n32, there's a memory
consumption hit, but at least it doesn't suffer the limitations that o32
has.  I did take OpenBSD for a spin on this machine (they use n64), and
it seemed snappy enough, so we'll try Linux again.

I have cross-compiled a n64 environment from AMD64, and so far, I have
set up QEMU to run a mips64r2 little-endian VM with 2GB RAM to build the
stages with.  Catalyst is building the first stage1 as I type this.

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.

I can also do mips (big-endian) builds if there is sufficient interest,
I still have an r4k6 Indy and rm5k2 O2 that can test such builds.  (Also
have a IP28 and IP30, but neither are operational AFAIK.  They do make
*great* door-stops however.)

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

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