Re: [gentoo-mips] MIPS32 Little-Endian softfloat packages, anyone interested?

[Manuel Lauss <mano@roarinelk.homelinux.net>]

Hi Joshua,

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 08:36:16PM -0400, Kumba wrote:
> Manuel Lauss wrote:
>> Hello!
>> For the last 3 years I've been "maintaining" a modest collection of
>> packages for generic little-endian MIPS32 softfloat systems (mainly for my
>> Alchemy hardware).  It includes a lot of stuff which is currently 
>> use-masked
>> on MIPS (qt4, scanner support, etc; almost all run-tested on real 
>> hardware).
>> Is there interest in the Gentoo(-MIPS) community for these packages?
>> A list of packages can be found at [1] as well as the custom portage 
>> profile
>> which was used to build them at [2].
>> The package tarball is ~1.1GB in size; 90% of the packages have been built 
>> with
>> gcc-4.3.3.  Mainly generic stuff I needed to do my work plus a few
>> just-for-fun things like KDE-4.2.2 (yes it runs, but at a glacial pace).
>> Thanks!
>> 	Manuel Lauss
>> [1] 
>> http://mlau.at/files/gentoo/mips32elsf/mips32elsf-packages-090420.tar.CONTENTS
>> [2] http://mlau.at/files/gentoo/mips32elsf/mips32elsf-etc-portage.tar.bz2
>
> This is pretty neat.  Although, our focus is more on the bigger MIPS 
> workstation, like the SGI stuff and even some of the Longsoon machines.  We 
> actually have a separate team that focuses more on the embedded machines, 
> including embedded ARM, MIPS, and other related equipment.

Although Alchemys are lacking a FPU and a decent GFX accelerator, I think
performance-wise they're not that slower than SGI boxes.


> I'd post this to the gentoo-embedded list, and you might find a few people 
> over there interested.  Some of the methods you used for building these 
> packages, including any toolchain changes, eclass/ebuild changes, might be 
> useful to them over there.

I actually didn't change any ebuilds, it's as "vanilla" as the Gentoo
installations on my x64 machines (all packages have been built natively).

I'll contact the embedded folks!

Thanks!
	Manuel Lauss