Re: Aha!

["Christopher C. Chimelis" <chris@debian.org>]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Pete Popov wrote:

> The mips3/4 cpus currently supported are supported in 32 bit mode; I've 
> never tried the mip64 port myself ... and I'm not sure what the above 
> mentioned concern is.

I've since found out that mips64 is still in progress and not quite "ready
for primetime", so I'll leave that issue behind for now.

> I think I just changed my mind about the mips ISA support :-) Currently, 
> it appears that the Indys and Indigo2s are the "best" supported SGI 
> systems. However, mips is much more than just SGI.  There are many 
> companies using mips cores for building SOCs, and mips32 is one of the 
> popular cores.  In the embedded market, mips has a very strong presence, 
> and embedded linux is the future (please note that my opinion is highly 
> biased in that regard).  So, I think it would be great to bring the 
> toolchain up to date, including mips 1/2 support. There is some very cool 
> mips hardware coming down the pipeline and, as I said, having an up to 
> date mips isa 1 and 2 (as well as 3 and 4) support would be great.

Good point.  I was wondering what the market was for MIPS outside of
SGI.  I knew there were other computers based on MIPS processors, but
wasn't sure about the embedded market and what iterations of mips
processors that they used.

> I think so. It has an entire chapter on "Complete Guide to the MIPS 
> Instruction Set", plus a chapter on assembler programming, an other 
> chapter on c mips programming, etc.  It brings the entire mips history 
> and architecture together in one book and covers pretty much everything 
> (including the caches, tlbs, floating point, etc). You might still want 
> to get the mips ISA specs from MIPS, but definitely do get this book.

Sounds like a must-buy :-)  I'll look into it shortly then.  Thanks for
the info!

> Sorry for uneducated question, but you seem to be involved heavily in 
> gcc/binutils?

Yes and no.  I'm currently the binutils maintainer for Debian and also the
de-facto port leader for Debian-Alpha, so dealing with the toolchain is a
frequent exercise for me.  A couple of us are also porting HURD over to
Alpha, so it's become even more of a task lately :-)  I try to keep my
input on binutils and gcc at a minimum (since many of the active
binutils/gcc developers know far more than I ever will), but I do assert
myself from time to time.

C