Hi.
As Aron says, the Loongson 3A boards may offer us some solution here, for mipsel anyhow, and maybe that offers us a mid-term solution for mips(be) whilst I work on other hardware options.
The Loongson 3A CPU patches are 'in flight' over at
linux-mips.org I believe. We will be testing the stability of those patches on a 3.12 kernel hopefully this week. If we find issues, we'll work with Loongson and others to fix them. If we then get a set of working patches in the path to upstream.....?
If this works out, my intention is to purchase three 3A motherboards to donate for mipsel use (2x buildd, 1x porter I'd expect?). Then *maybe* we could move one of the BCM91250 Swarm boards over from mipsel to mips(be) whilst I work on some other BE options?
I potentially have one spare 3A motherboard we could get installed and running pretty soon whilst I purchase more if this works out. They are the 'LS3A-RS780E' 3A board btw. You can find a PDF named:
here:
It is in Chinese, but the pictures show you the board layout etc. - it is basically a full sized PC ATX mobo with AMD chipset and 3A processor.
I really wish there were a way from sw to tell which 2F CPUs had the issues (early revisions) and which (newer ones) do not, but afaik there is not (unless somebody knows differently? - some 'hidden' silicon version register maybe?). They would make OK mipsel porter boxes if nothing else, and are easily available.
As to other BE board options, I'm hoping to have some news in the new year. Things are looking promising, but they just take time to work out.
Graham