Re: MIPS port backlog, autobuilder machines and some arrogance
On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 12:10:14PM -0600, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 12:53:39AM +1100, Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader wrote:
> > [ Responding to this since I've been BCCed. ]
>
> Oh, nice. If hadn't been Bcc'ed you wouldn't respond? That's
> reasuring, since you seem to be one of the few persons who's got some
> information on the subject and are somewhat willing to talk.
>
> > Also, while we are covering this topic, let me mention that mips is
> > not a "door stop" architecture. While most machines which were
> > _very_ powerful in the past are fairly dated now (e.g. SGI Indy),
> > mips CPUs are actively being developed. There are CPUs with 2 cores
> > and > 1 GHz frequency.
>
> Care to give an example of one of this "_very_ powerful" machines,
> which are in production and where Linux actually runs? The "_very_
> powerful" SGI Indy was attractive at its time only because of some of
> the graphics boards it supported, none of which are supported on Linux.
> There are some newer "_very_ powerful" machines with MIPS processors,
> but AFAIK noone has actually ported Linux to them. There's one "_very_
> powerful" machine using MIPS processors which supposedly will be made
> available with Linux on it in the future, yet it's already shadowed by
> machines using AMD64 processors which happen to be available now and
> where Linux runs now with support for all the functionality of the
> hardware.
>
> Just curious...
There's one on my desk. It's an embedded board produced by Broadcom,
complete with dual cores, IDE, and dual gigabit ethernet. MIPS, Inc.
has a similar board; Debian has one of these somewhere, IIRC. These
little fellows have more computing power than our PPC build daemon.
The machines you are likely to be thinking of are things like the SGI
R12000; the conventional workstation-type MIPS platforms have much
worse support than the embedded ones, but the embedded ones pack a
serious punch nowadays.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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