[gentoo-mips] Re: What kind of MIPS hardware do we have? (Looking to restart Gentoo/MIPS, need info)

[Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm going to be working on Gentoo/MIPS. I'm planning to provide N32
> stages, and I want to know what kind of MIPS hardware people have to
> run Gentoo. With this info, I should be able to better prioritize the
> tasks.
>
> So please reply with what kind of hardware you've got.
>
> Thanks!
> Matt

Thanks everybody for your responses.

A bit of background: MIPS has 3 ABIs: o32, n32, n64. o32 is the common
denominator, but is pretty inefficient. See [1]. As I suspected, all
the hardware people care about can use the n32 ABI, which is quite a
bit better.

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

I've got a working n32 big-endian installation, and am preparing an
n32 little-endian installation at the moment. Once these are set up,
I'll start preparing some n32 stages.

I think first priority should be mips4 big-endian. From there, I don't
know whether I should build a mips4-le stage for cobalt systems, or a
mips3-le stage that would work for cobalt and Loongson. Do we know of
any plain MIPS III little-endian hardware?

Also, the MIPS port is going to be pretty unmaintainable until we can
kill off ~mips from ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Currently, attempting to upgrade
almost anything causes something to break.

What do you guys think?

Thanks,
Matt

[1] http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/WhatsWrongWithO32N32N64