On 23:13 Sat 10 Jul , Matt Turner wrote: > To summarize the hardware collection > - 5 MIPS III/Loongson little-endian STMicroelectronics systems (Lemote, Gdium) > - 11 MIPS IV big-endian SGI systems > - 3 MIPS IV little-endian Cobalt systems > - 2 MIPS64 selectable-endian Broadcom systems > > What do you guys think? Hi Matt, Sorry for my interference, but I want to write some random thoughts that come and go, for while now. It's good that you asked about what hardware we have these days. Btw, I have two SGI O2, a r5k and a r10k. The r10k is useless for linux (unless something hanpened inside the last ~2 years that I served in the army and was away). The r5k is in good condition but *extremely slow*. Once upon a time, when the mips stable keyword wasn't dropped yet, I wanted to become a mips arch tester, but found it extremely difficult to work with my r5k, cause it was very very slow as I said before. I tried to find cheap and better mips hardware but with no luck. Those days, Lemote just started to exist, and I couldn't find any reseller in Europe. The SGI stopped direct support of o2/origin hardware(unless I'm wrong), which makes it difficult for someone to find spare parts in case something happens to a SGI machine (unless you 're in US). From the side of the gentoo linux developer/arch tester/(at least from my side), we really need new, good and fast hardware in order to work productively. For a big project, such the Gentoo Mips Project, we need more people with good and probably also different hardware. But! For example, it's very difficult to do any gentoo development(ebuild writing/testing, arch testing, compiling stuff, even to build stages with catalyst), with embedded hardware or with old SGI hardware. So, my question is, what hardware can a gentoo dev get these days, in order to work productively? And another question, a project such as the gentoo MIPS project, should see where the future goes and not to live in the past, supporting old hardware crap, so where does the MIPS future go anyway? Will it go to embedded devices only? Will it also go to desktop systems/production servers? (I really believe that the gentoo MIPS project died the last years cause people didn't have the right hardware to work) -- Panagiotis Christopoulos ( pchrist ) ( Gentoo Lisp Project )