On Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 12:24:53PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was surprised to learn when I went digging that there actually is a
> debian-mipsel port in progress. The more I look into the matter the happier I
> become, because I was fully expecting to have to do most of the work from
> scratch myself, and I'm thrilled that this is not the case.
>
> I have a Cobalt CacheRaq that we're using for an application that requires a
> kernel newer than the included 2.0.34, and given that the only updates coming
> out of Sun Cobalt are security fixes, I'd like to upgrade the whole OS to
> Debian while I'm at it. I have no problem with putting some work into the
> mips port in order to do this right -- all in all, I'm just happy that
> I'm not going to be building this system completely from scratch.
I fear that you wont get the Debian-Mipsel stuff to work with a 2.0 kernel.
The 2.0 port is completely discontinued and the 2.2/2.4 ports to mips and
mipsel are completely independent ports from scratch. There are people
working on a 2.4 kernel for the Cube and Raq but i havent heard anything
lately.
> This is the first Debian port I've gotten involved in, so I'm not sure where
> the best place for me to start is. Is there a mipsel autobuilder yet? What
>From yesterday/today on there is an Autobuilder set up by Ryan Murray.
> means are available for bootstrapping a Debian mipsel system? I've always
> liked the 'debootstrap' package, which doesn't appear to be built for mipsel
> yet -- has anybody tried using this? (I guess there are still some problems
> with it wrt sid, which of course is the only distro that includes mipsel..
> perhaps it worked with sid at some point in the past, or perhaps someone is
> working on fixing this problem?)
The whole mips/mipsel issue has a lot of work to do especially on packages
for installation like kernel-package, boot-floppies, bootloader etc.
There are a couple of completely different archs so there wont probably be
ONE installation disk set.
> Are most people doing mipsel development using a native or cross-compiling
> build system? After many years of dealing with Cobalts (great systems for
> many things, but compiling is not one of them), I personally prefer using
> cross-compilers from my x86 systems as much as possible, but I know there are
> people who feel cross-compiling is only appropriate while bootstrapping a
> port. If cross-compiling is considered ok, I might even be able to offer the
> use of a system for an autobuilder..
Cross-compiling is ok for kernel and probably the first toolchain. Not much
else. You will have a lot of hassle with autoconf stuff and its not worth
the effort. Try setting up a chroot environment on your cacheraq and
put the mipsel packages into it and try to chroot to it. If this works
you should be able to go on and compile stuff. Alternatively i can offer
access to mips and mipsel machines on the net.
> At any rate, I hope to have a Debian chroot on this Cobalt by the middle of
> next week; at which point, if there's work I can help with, point me to it,
> and if not, I'm sure I'll find plenty of work of my own. :)
Exactly - On one of the mipsel machines i have up and running there is
a 2.0.6 glibc based system and a 2.2 chroot. The other one is running 2.2
natively and the next weeks i'll convert the other too :)
Flo
--
Florian Lohoff flo@rfc822.org +49-5201-669912
Why is it called "common sense" when nobody seems to have any?