Gentoo Archives: gentoo-mips

From: Manuel Lauss <mano@×××××××××××××××××××.net>
To: gentoo-mips@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-mips] Re: What kind of MIPS hardware do we have? (Looking to restart Gentoo/MIPS, need info)
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:04:47
Message-Id: 20100721080431.GA19651@wormhole
In Reply to: [gentoo-mips] Re: What kind of MIPS hardware do we have? (Looking to restart Gentoo/MIPS, need info) by Matt Turner
1 On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 11:13:04PM -0400, Matt Turner wrote:
2 > On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Matt Turner <mattst88@×××××.com> wrote:
3 > > Hi,
4 > > I'm going to be working on Gentoo/MIPS. I'm planning to provide N32
5 > > stages, and I want to know what kind of MIPS hardware people have to
6 > > run Gentoo. With this info, I should be able to better prioritize the
7 > > tasks.
8 > >
9 > > So please reply with what kind of hardware you've got.
10 > >
11 > > Thanks!
12 > > Matt
13 >
14 > Thanks everybody for your responses.
15 >
16 > A bit of background: MIPS has 3 ABIs: o32, n32, n64. o32 is the common
17 > denominator, but is pretty inefficient. See [1]. As I suspected, all
18 > the hardware people care about can use the n32 ABI, which is quite a
19 > bit better.
20 >
21 > To summarize the hardware collection
22 > - 5 MIPS III/Loongson little-endian STMicroelectronics systems (Lemote, Gdium)
23 > - 11 MIPS IV big-endian SGI systems
24 > - 3 MIPS IV little-endian Cobalt systems
25 > - 2 MIPS64 selectable-endian Broadcom systems
26
27 I have some little-endian MIPS32 hardware which runs latest Gentoo.
28
29
30 > I've got a working n32 big-endian installation, and am preparing an
31 > n32 little-endian installation at the moment. Once these are set up,
32 > I'll start preparing some n32 stages.
33
34 > I think first priority should be mips4 big-endian. From there, I don't
35 > know whether I should build a mips4-le stage for cobalt systems, or a
36 > mips3-le stage that would work for cobalt and Loongson. Do we know of
37 > any plain MIPS III little-endian hardware?
38
39 I believe all the small MIPS32-based routers which run OpenWRT qualify.
40 Hoever I get the impression you want to focus on the "large" SGI
41 and 64bit Broadcom systems?
42
43
44 > Also, the MIPS port is going to be pretty unmaintainable until we can
45 > kill off ~mips from ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Currently, attempting to upgrade
46 > almost anything causes something to break.
47
48 In my experience, lots of packages have problems with GCC-4.4 (removal
49 of the "h" asm constraint), and above all, the toolchain itself is
50 pretty problematic: Lots of linker errors with large libraries (e.g.
51 xulrunner, qt-webkit, gcj, ...)
52
53
54 Manuel