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Kumba wrote: |
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> Tomasz Chmielewski wrote: |
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>> Stephen P. Becker wrote: |
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> |
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>>> That and I don't think qemu is particularly fast. |
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>> |
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>> Whatever slow it is, it will be faster than trying to compile anything |
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>> natively on these tiny routers :) |
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> |
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> Thou hath not tryeth to compileth glibc upon a RaQ2 of Cobalt, have |
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> thee? :) |
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> |
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> Granted you can jack the RAM in a cobalt to a decent size for it to suck |
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> down behemoths like glibc, assuming you got an emulator to work, the |
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> emulator would likely be slower than a RaQ2, and probably slower than |
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> native compiles. The only upside is being able to feed the emulated |
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> environment more RAM. |
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> |
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|
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Last I heard... QEMU was emulating a ~30MHz MIPS machine... on a modern |
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(>2GHz) x86 machine. Your router most likely has a clock speed in the |
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range of 100~200MHz; much faster than QEMU. |
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|
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Others, like gxemul (which may be better suited to your needs) suffer |
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similar performance losses. |
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|
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>> So, this means, that if I build a whole gentoo-mips under qemu - |
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>> sounds easy, doesn't it? :), with mipsel uclibc stages/-march=mips32, |
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>> almost each and every binary copied from such a system should run on |
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>> these tiny routers? |
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> |
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> |
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> We generally discourage people who are new to non-x86 from venturing off |
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> into experiments like this initially. The experiment can sometimes be |
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> overwhelming, anf frustration eventually kills off any motivation to |
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> complete it. Our usual suggestion is to get yourself a cheap SGI Box, |
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> like an Indy or an O2, play with it for a few months and learn how MIPS |
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> works, then you'll have an idea of how stuff works in comparison to |
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> their more inefficient x86 cousins. Other archs, like Sparc, work well |
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> too as non-x86 playtoys. Then the original task can sometimes be easier |
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> (but not always). |
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|
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Better still... get a Cobalt machine if you can. |
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|
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The Cobalt machines run a little-endian MIPS4 CPU, which, while they |
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can't run MIPS32 ISA binaries, they are at least the right endianness to |
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be able to build stuff natively for your router. And although they are |
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quite slow (generally 250MHz, and no secondary cache), they'll be a lot |
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faster than most emulators out there. |
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|
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This, with a suitable µClibc-based chroot environment, should do quite |
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well for the task. |
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|
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I still stand by what Kumba said ... start with something that is |
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officially well-supported (e.g. an SGI box, or a Qube2/RaQ2) to get |
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familiar with MIPS ... then work towards building for the router. :-) |
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-- |
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Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter) .'''. |
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Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer '.'` : |
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .'.' |
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http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter :.' |
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