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

[Panagiotis Christopoulos]

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 )