Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
Anthony Towns wrote:
[snip]
> So, I'd just like to re-emphasise this, because I still haven't seen
> anything that counts as useful. I'm thinking something like "We use s390
> to host 6231 scientific users on Debian in a manner compatible to the
> workstations they use; the software we use is ....; we rely on having
> security support from Debian because we need to be on the interweb 2;
> ...". At the moment, the only use cases I'm confident exist are:
>
> m68k, mips, mipsel, hppa: I've got one in the basement, and I like
> to brag that I run Debian on it; also I occassionally get some work out of
> it, but it'd be trivial to replace with i386.
Well, for mips/mipsel, this covers only the machines which aren't that
relevant nowadays. Mips is one of the most numerous 32/64bit architectures
currently in use, but most of the time it is hidden in things which aren't
commonly recognized as computers.
http://www.mips.com/
A significant portion of mips/mipsel usage is geared towards networked
devices. Note that MIPS, Inc. does not manufacuture devices or CPUs,
they sell CPU designs.
http://www.mips.com/content/Corporate/AboutUs/content_html#mips
While it would be fun to run Debian on your digital camera with a large
flashcard, I don't see a real use for it, so I will restrict the
following list to Products where a stable debian distribution can be
useful.
- Cheap/Lean/Silent desktop computer
http://www.pmc-sierra.com/xiaohu/
- Digital TV/Media Player/Video Recorder
http://www.ati.com/products/settopwonderxilleon/
http://www.semicon.toshiba.co.jp/eng/prd/micro/prd_inf/tx49.html
Those will commonly have USB/Ethernet, and in some cases storage,
which means they can be used as X-termial/Network Client/Lightweight
standalone machine.
- WAP/Small router/DSL Modem
http://meshcube.org/index_e.html
http://mycable.de/xxs1500/
Devices in this class had ~8 MB RAM two years ago and could at best
run a customized linux. Today they have ~32 MB, can run Debian, but
it is still beneficial to use a customized version
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/picodebian). They are likely to grow
further in the near future.
The main hindrance for Debian on these systems is the lack of
available storage. The size of cheap flash memory grows much faster
than the debian base installation, so this problem will go away over
time as well.
- High-end prototype boards
http://sibyte.broadcom.com/public/boards/index.html
Those boards are used by vendors to evaluate/test the CPU they have
chosen for their product (Cisco and NetApp are well-known names).
Some Debian developers have such boards. While they aren't easy to
come by, and the userbase outside Debian is small, they are valuable
because of their speed.
[snip]
> arm: We're developing some embedded boxes, that won't run Debian
> proper, but it's really convenient to have Debian there to bootstrap
> them trivially.
ARM is roughly in the same situation like the slower MIPS CPUs, but
with a large percentage of it used in mobile devices. With mobile
networking on the rise Debian gets more interesting there.
> s390: Hey, it's got spare cycles, why not?
AFAIH there are some serious Debian users on s390, but they don't talk
about it publicly.
[snip]
> Knowing why you're
> using Debian and not another distribution or OS would be interesting too.
Outside the non-free/commercial realm, there are three choices for
mips/mipsel:
- NetBSD, with a small core of software, limited (build-)testing
outside that, and reproducibility problems caused by the
source-centric approach
- Gentoo, with all of the above, linux based, and still tagged as
experimental, which means experimental by Gentoo standards
- Debian
Thiemo
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